Shadowed Souls Part 4
by The Cat's Whiskers
Summary: Next in "The Blood Will Tell" Series. In every generation there is the Chosen One. Until Buffy Summers turned the Slayers into a franchise. And did we really expect Evil to simply shrug its shoulders and say, 'Oh well, it was nice while it lasted'
1. Chapter 1

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 1**

Unsurprisingly, Angel and company found the Hyperion was a hive of activity, with Xander, Kennedy and, surprisingly, Andrew Wells directing traffic as the Slayers sorted bedrolls and holdalls and other necessary accoutrements; Faith and Robin apparently having gone with the food order to do a circuit of the local all night takeouts and the Korean market. Slayers, unsurprisingly, had very high metabolic rates.

Prudently keeping themselves out of the direct hurrying and scurrying, Giles' sort-of partner Olivia (Angel, always haunted by Jenny Calendar, hoped their relationship would work out) and The Initiative's Graham 'Grey' Miller had taken up discreet standing-guard positions, Miller at the basement door and Olivia at the French doors leading in from the rear courtyard garden/entrance to the main hotel lobby. Of course, only the insane, suicidal or stupid would launch a frontal attack on a place wall-to-wall with real-life superheroes, but you never could tell.

Angel noted that both were calm but alert, not complacent – Miller of course was military; according to Spike (how _did _his grandson get to know this stuff?) Olivia was from an ancient African Watcher family on one side, and on the other a direct descendent both of some legendary military-genius Queen Idia of Benin who was basically the Alexander the Great of her time and also one of England's most ancient titled families during the days of Empire. _Sangfroid_ in the face of _everything _was apparently her standard operating procedure, so she and Giles should fit like hand and glove, hopefully…

Sensibly Andrew Wells was making sure Wesley's books and paraphernalia in the lobby on what used to be the check-in front desk hadn't been disturbed, so Angel got out of the way and went over to where Wesley was with Willow and Giles sorting them out.

"I should be ready in about ten minutes," Wesley assured him, which didn't really help – if there were any other way to do this...

"How long will the ritual take?" asked Xander, glancing at his watch.

"The ritual will only take moments," Wesley explained as he and Willow sorted through books and peculiar objects, "but walking the Ghost Roads…that's a different proposition."

"If I do have to leave I'll come straight back." Xander assured Buffy.

"Leave?" echoed Angel, astonished that Xander Harris would go anywhere when his family – Willow, Buffy and Giles – were about to embark upon something so perilous.

Xander flashed his trademark goofy grin, which combined with his eye-patch to actually make him look _more _unthreateningly wholesome. "True Confessions: – I'm a slave to the mighty dollar. Got a meeting with a guy about a new eco-homes construction project near UC Sunnydale campus; he wants to hire one of my crews. No big, but if I have to split I should be there and back within three to four hours maximum…just…can you _all_ do the Xan-man a favour and try _not_ to trigger the next Apocalypse while I'm gone?"

Buffy, however, wasn't having any of Xander's attempted self-deprecation. "Xander keeps us in chocolate…and sharp pointy things." She smiled at her dear friend, "Do what you need to Xander, it's okay. Nobody said that supporting us bunch of deadbeats had to be part your job description forever, like your own Slayer-curse clause."

"Hey, everyone needs a hobby." Xander shrugged, "Besides, hordes of hot girls gratefully snatching pairs of _Manolo Blahniks_ and _Jimmy Choos_ from my hands…there is no bad here."

"Except that you now seem to be an expert on _ladies' shoe fashions_." Spike, unnoticed behind them, put in derisorily.

"True, my over-bleached friend, but I repeat: 'hordes of hot girls'. " Xander waggled both his eyebrows, one bouncing up and down over his piratical black eye-patch comically.

"Erm…if you need help…" Angel made the offer tentatively, only too aware from the days of his dating Buffy in Sunnydale just how impossible it was for a Slayer to do regular everyday things; the whole senior prom fiasco on its own had been an object lesson in that.

"Nah, we've _all_ actually _got _jobs – colour us stunned - it's just we don't get _paid_ until we start them, which won't be until the school's built and running." Buffy explained.

"They're building the High School _again?_" Spike rolled his eyes. "Got to give them points for persistence, if not sense."

"Third time's the charm, I guess." Buffy shrugged. "Plus, the new school is actually on top of a nice, boring hill, not directly over the Hellmouth, which should seriously reduce the mortality and general weirdness rate. Anyway, once the government gave Sunnydale the compensation cash, the local councillors – amazingly – offered Robin Wood back he Principal's job and me – I'm still pinching myself - part-time Guidance Counsellor as long as I get qualified at night school before the school re-opens in the fall. Giles is going to be a School Librarian again and it turns out Olivia is qualified to teach Mathematics and Physics, so she got hired too – apparently she taught at Roedean or one of those really elite British girls' schools. Willow got so many email enquiries about The Magic Box when news got out they were going to rebuild the town that she's nearly ready to re-open Anya's Magic Box. Emphasis on _nearly_."

Tactfully, nobody commented on the new name for the business. "But you don't get _paychecks_ until Sunnydale opens for business again – which won't be until the Fall." Angel realised.

"Yep; so double-shifts at the Doublemeat Palace all summer." Buffy rolled her eyes. "If it weren't for Xander's burgeoning construction empire keeping us in chocolaty goodness…"

Angel looked at the rather pink-faced young man, recalling when he had discovered what Xander had done for him in the Hyperion. Once Team Angel and the Scooby Gang had reached an _Entente Cordiale_ after they'd come to fetch Dawn and saved her from Staavuz, they had camped out here for a few days. After the Scoobies' return to Sunnydale, Angel had presciently decided to try and get at least one wing of the Hyperion ship-shape for the next inevitable descent of the horde, concentrating on the right-hand wing as you entered through the main doors – that wing contained the hotel's industrial-size kitchen, in-house restaurant, swimming pool and gymnasium area, more useful than the other wing which had the ballroom, casino, bar, games room, library and what originally had been writing, reading and television rooms, the hotel having been built in 1928, before Television was a household staple.

Trying to renovate and repair that wing as fast as possible in the scant spare time he had, Angel discovered that Xander Harris had apparently spent the duration of _his_ stay wandering the halls with insomnia and a hammer, as a myriad of 'niggling' jobs involving doorjambs, window frames, pipes and wiring had been repaired, replaced, fixed and fitted. Thanks in no small part to this, that wing of the hotel was functional though not yet fully refurbished or redecorated. Most of the rooms were still packed with clutter, but all had plastered walls, floorboards and fully operational plumbing, heating and lighting.

"I…" he began to thank Xander sincerely; during Angel's tenure in the Scooby Gang, they had had at best a 'non-relationship'.

Angel had viewed Xander as a foolish child not worth getting to know, as he would soon get himself killed because of his silly crush on the Slayer; he had finally twigged that in turn Xander had viewed _him_ as a pretentious show-off in need of a good staking. In the half-decade since he'd left Sunnydale, Angel had seen Xander Harris maybe twice, but not only had the other man put in a lot of work to help Angel's renovation of the Hyperion and simply left without saying a word, he had clearly made enough of a successful career for himself to be the financial safety net for the entire Scooby Gang and, it looked like, the new Slayers as well.

"_Es nada._" Xander smiled. "Not for a few weeks at least, but I might be able to spare one of my crews when you start on the other wing?"

"It's okay, like you said, everyone needs a hobby." Angel explained to take any insult out of his refusal. "But thank-you, this isn't the easiest place to work on, especially as the resident restless dead have no compunction about hiding your tools or hurling a two-by-four at you if they don't like the colour scheme…"

Xander rolled his eyes theatrically. "_Tell_ me about it. Rebuilding an entire town that's only _technically_ not on a Hellmouth is bad enough when you've got some annoying old gimp trying to make out I don't know a T-Square from a Four-Eighths Gripley, but when the old gimp's annoying and _dead, _and _constantly_ bitching about how his son-in-law offed him two years before the Great Depression for his stock portfolio – " his watch suddenly beeped. "Oops, sorry; can I use a landline phone, reception's better?"

"Sure, go into my office." Angel nodded towards the room automatically before realising with a pang just how much he _missed_ that small cramped room looking out across the lobby; his penthouse was opulent – and as soulless as Angelus.

Thoughtfully he watched Xander as the younger man walked briskly into the office, shut the door and picked up the phone. He didn't dress in sharp suits like Gunn, but that watch was discreetly top-range and all-singing-all-dancing, and as he spoke to whomever was on the other end of the line he moved and spoke with an unconscious self-confidence, yet no over-compensating belligerence; a confidence that the boy Xander, growing up with alcoholic abusive parents, had critically lacked. He even carried off the eye-patch with panache and understated style, but what demonstrated his genuine maturity and secure sense of self was the fact that neither of those things were _why_ Xander still wore it.

Familiarity didn't breed contempt as much as forgetfulness, and after a while, people forgot about vampires' superior sensory abilities, including smell, sight and _hearing_. Angel had gleaned from various overheard fragments of conversation that Xander had elected to have a medical prosthetic eyeball fitted and still retain the eye-patch despite the excellent false eye, firmly declining Willow's offer of attempting to mystically restore the lost eye. Angel had heard Xander explain to Graham Miller that he had turned down the offer and that he retained the eye-patch '_to remind myself, and all these super-powered Slayers that what kills us is not our enemy, but our own complacency. This eye-patch is a daily lesson in the most important lesson all these girls need to learn and us old-timers need to remember, that nobody is invulnerable_.'

An acutely perceptive statement, and doubtless a big factor in why none other than The Initiative's Graham Miller was currently standing guard on behalf of possibly the world's most famous living (no pun intended) vampire – Miller wasn't here because of Angel, he was here because of Xander. And right now, Angel found himself completely unsurprised by that – the Quiet Man of the Scooby Gang had long since come into his own.

Working as a site manager for the construction company that had rebuilt Sunnydale gave Xander a lot of flexibility and an excuse to travel _incognito_ on behalf of the Scoobies, true, but didn't fully 'stretch' his intellect or skills. Angel would guess that subliminally, whilst a bit flabby, Xander had never entirely lost the sharper reflexes and senses from being turned into a mystically-enhanced human hyena, or from whatever biochemical Frankenstein's recipe Sunnydale High's swim coach had been slipping to his fish-boys. Nor had he apparently entirely lost the 'soldierly' qualities and psychology he'd acquired courtesy of Ethan Rayne's Halloween spell, although surely anyone should have figured that out from observing the Sunnydale High Class of '99's epic battle against Mayor Richard Wilkins I-III/Giant Demon Snake. Sure he and Buffy had been the King and Queen, but the General in the field was Xander Harris.

In less than 24 hours of nightmare logistics, Xander had somehow organised, equipped and wielded the entire senior year into a reasonably cohesive field unit. Above and beyond that, like Nelson striding the deck of _HMS Victory _in full uniform, Xander Harris had made himself a target for the hungry demon snake standing unarmed on a chair in one of those 'interesting' floral shirts he used to wear, calmly directing traffic like he was coaching a Little League baseball game instead of fighting a 50-foot-high ravenous evil serpent.

Frightened but not panicked, the seniors had taken their cue from Xander, and the total number of kids killed had been less than half-a-dozen, even counting undead dead like Harmony. It was probably not a coincidence that according to Andrew Wells, in their adult lives Sunnydale's Class of 1999 had turned out to have very 'together' lifestyles and well-adjusted personalities, not falling prey to the usual drink/drugs/adultery/crime/ sabotaging-my-own-life-to-end-up-on-skid-row stresses often seen amongst medics, lawyers, politicians, military personnel, sports stars, famous actors/musicians/celebrities and "perfect" suburban families. There was an entire laundry list of former Sunnydale High 'peers' of the Scooby Gang who were achieving fame and fortune in a non-skanky, non-self destructive and generally well-adjusted way.

Angel had also overheard Andrew telling Spike how, a couple of months back, just before Dawn's precipitous arrival pursued by Staavuz, a group of demons had decided to 'go human-style' and take out as many Slayers as possible with a _bomb_, disconcerting everyone including Buffy who were focused on fangs, claws, acid-for-blood and general slime, not wires, timers and a very badly concocted explosive 'sludge' that was liable to detonate at any second because of aforesaid dubious concocting.

According to Andrew, Xander had even smiled – '_with a peculiar enigmatic wryness, y'know…he's so __**deep**_ _sometimes…'_ and disarmed the thing in about two seconds flat, muttering something mostly inaudible about '_hanging with Jack O'Toole came in useful after all – who knew_?'

According to Andrew, Giles, Buffy and Willow believed that '_either his soldier-survival instincts kicked in or that post-senior year road trip – which he neeeever talks about, y'know – was a lot more interesting than Xander's ever let on.'_

As Spike would probably have put it, truth be told, Angel wouldn't have really registered the fact if Xander had made CNN Live battling Godzilla. He'd noted Xander seemed subtly different somehow following the night they'd managed to stop the Sisterhood of Jhe opening the Hellmouth, but his main reaction had been deep irritation at the boy's blundering in on his break-up speech to Buffy, especially as Xander had been the only one of them who spent the night comfy at home sleeping in his own bed with old movies on TV!

But that hadn't just been Xander – in Sunnydale he and Buffy had been so focused on each other that _nothing_ else had really impinged. Wesley had been his – and Cordelia's – rock for nearly five years, yet Wesley had made so little impact on Angel in Sunnydale that even his usually reliable photographic memory produced nothing more of Sunnydale Wesley that a vague blurry impression of a pair of spectacles floating above an over-starched suit out of fashion half-a-century or more…and a solid sensation of unrelenting prissiness.

But most usefully, from whatever cause, Xander could relate to the military personnel of _The Initiative_ in a way nobody else in the Scooby Gang or Team Angel could or more pertinently would. Like Graham Miller and Riley Finn, Xander possessed a wry, dry humour that had seen him gel well with such as Oz, who was also apparently helping out the Scooby Gang in between touring with his band, _Dingoes Ate My Baby_. He had also been completely unfazed by the task of providing in practical ways for the needs of young, beautiful Slayers: lots of Slayers. With that résumé, it was no surprise _The Initiative_, or at least Finn, had embarked on a subtle campaign aimed at Xander: 'are you interested in a little sideline freelancing to keep those mystical muscles honed and toned'?

To himself, Angel admitted he had always been predisposed to like Graham Miller because the man had persuaded Riley Finn to leave Sunnydale and rejoin _The Initiative_, so when Buffy had called and asked if he minded 'Grey' tagging along because Finn had sent him to New Sunnydale to work with Xander and Oz on some 'project' she carefully didn't name – and which Angel carefully didn't ask about – then he had been sanguine about the whole idea.

Besides, _now _he had the advantage of being able to take the moral high ground with _The Initiative._ It was only after Lawson had come after him that Angel had put together what Spike had revealed of the whole set-up at UC Sunnydale plus his own short and sharp interaction with Riley Finn and realized just how long _The Initiative_ had been going, and how long it had been corrupted beyond redemption.

Angel had been able to get Buffy to give Finn, Miller and the other Maggie Walsh Initiative survivors the lowdown on his wartime coercion into The Initiative's service; Finn and Miller _et al_ were now suitably grateful that Maggie Walsh hadn't been some evil sociopath (or mostly not); relieved of the burden of guilt in the knowledge that The Initiative had been too far gone decades before they were even born, never mind got anywhere near it.

Above all, the adventure might result in Xander meeting a new lady, which Buffy had bluntly admitted to Angel over the phone was the main hope of the Scooby Gang – she'd even indicated as much to Finn and Miller. Xander's job made him buff, the eye patch lent a raffish charm, he was wry, dry, witty, funny and rock solid to the Earth's core in a crisis. Yet despite being surrounded by bevies of young, beautiful, exceptionally limber and high-libido slayers; Xander remained single since Anya's death.

Angel could relate: Darla, Buffy, Cordy…sometimes you were blessed and cursed to experience a love that, whether it ended in joy or despair, was so profound as to be beyond words. He had no doubt that the Scooby Gang were acting with the best of intentions, but he found himself more than once swallowing back an impulse to lecture them on the merits of backing off and not meddling. That had certainly been Spike's opinion when Angel gave him the heads up on Miller's imminent arrival and the reasons behind it, so his grandson wouldn't react too aggressively when confronted by a member of The Initiative. But then he'd known Spike would understand – Drusilla, Buffy – Spike had always been capable of love without a soul.

Although…Angel strolled over to the counter where Andrew was flustering over Wesley's books like a constipated chicken, and discreetly cast any eye over the gathered Slayers, most of whom were awaiting Faith and Robin's return with takeout by sharpening, honing, whittling and polishing enough implements of pointy-ended painful death to outfit any sword-n-sorcery B-movie requiring a cast of thousands.

Even Xander's love life changed colour when you looked at it through a different light. Demonic Mrs Robinson and life-sucking Inca mummy girl aside, Xander's track record was impeccable in his 'type': Buffy, Slayer; Cordelia, Champion; Willow, Sorceress; Faith, Slayer; Anya, Demon. At the time, Cordelia hadn't _been_ a champion of course; Willow had been adolescent hormones in overdrive and Faith had only been a one-night…well…ten minute knee trembler…but the symmetry was ironic – in Sunnydale, Xander had been in love with Buffy but she had picked Angel whilst Cordelia had been with Xander – in LA, Angel had fallen in love with Cordelia, whom he'd never even got to kiss –whilst she was alive. There was a cosmic joke in there somewhere, for sure.

Then there was Dawn, eons old 'mystical key' who had first crushed on – Xander. Of all the Sunnydale masculinity to choose from, that girl who turned out to be a demon intending to sacrifice a male to open the Hellmouth had chosen…Xander. Then there was that other girl whose cheating ex-boyfriend had been transformed into a giant worm by Anya – back as Anyanka – Ninny…no, Nancy…Nancy Doyle, that was it. Whom had she dated for all of three hours before they were attacked by said giant worm? Step forward, Harris: Alexander Lavelle.

According to Giles' recollections of that alternate reality Cordy had created by wishing Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, in that place, the Vampire Slayers had been Oz, Gay Larry, and Nancy Doyle. Giles speculated that since a new Slayer was still called to replace one that died, there was every chance that Nancy Doyle was a Potential; indeed, she had moved back to New Sunnydale and now ran the coffee bar just down the street from where Willow would be opening Anya's Magic Box and was being discreetly monitored by the Scoobies. Angel had no doubt that Giles, Buffy – and for some reason, he suspected Andrew Wells also - was smart enough to pay close attention to _any _woman that Xander looked more than once at or who had an interest in _him_, because the likelihood of them being either a super-heroine or a super-villainess bad-ass was in the high 'ninety-eight to ninety-nine' percentile.

"I think we're ready." Unaware of breaking Angel's speculations, Giles came over and informed them quietly, just as the doors opened and with impeccable timing, Robin Wood staggered in bearing a huge plastic bread tray loaded with take-out Chinese and Thai boxes.

Sunnydale High's former- and soon-to-be-again Principal braced himself against the surging horde, as Angel and his team prudently got out of the line of sight. Within a few minutes the tray was empty so Robin leaned it up against the wall.

"We'll do the Ritual of the Ghost Roads after everyone's eaten." Wesley announced to a general murmur of consensus.

From the courtyard-garden entrance came two Slayers Angel didn't know bearing another couple of batches of food between them, followed a couple of seconds later by a distinctly dyspeptic looking Faith, who watched the two distribute the latest round of dinner with a disgruntled expression.

Wesley took a step forward, feeling a ridiculous pang of guilt over the meeting he'd had last night with Justine Cooper, even though he'd only been Faith's Watcher for less than a month before -

Twin roars echoed and re-echoed due to the lobby's perfect acoustics, like a dozen hungry lions sounding the kill, erupting from the throats of both male vampires. Andrew was not the only person to drop his food in shock and fear, but nobody noticed as Angel and Spike, both in full-vampire face, dropped into fighting crouches and began the signature pre-attack stalk towards Faith.

Continued in Chapter 2…

_© 2006 & 2010_

The Cat's Whiskers 


	2. Chapter 2

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 2**

Startled, the Dark Slayer instinctively dropped into a combat stance herself, drawing up the twin dirks she now customarily carried in her boots, balancing on the balls of her feet ready for instant action as Angel glided forward with the menacing, total silent grace of a shark from the left, Spike doing likewise from the right. Never had the two been more dangerous – their pre-soul psychopathic partnership that had lasted nearly forty human years enabled them to move and think – and act - as one being.

Robin Wood snatched a battle-axe from the lobby's weapon cabinet; his dark gaze immediately fixed on Spike, as Slayers and assorted others likewise scrambled for weaponry even in their shock – Grey Miller, prudently eschewing conventional weaponry on this mission, pulled out an impressive looking James Black Bowie knife and quiet Olivia pulled a genuine antique but still sharp _glaive-guisarme_ from her purse – designed to be fitted to the end of a spear shaft, the long blade even had a wicked little hook on the reverse side – ideal for disabling cavalry riders – or disembowelling an unfortunate victim.

Hands like steel grabbed Harmony and she found Kennedy one side and Willow on the other, grim determination on each face, so she subsided. Gru' drew his sword, while Lorne and Gunn snatched up clubs and Fred's figure began to take on a spreading powder-blue tinge while at the same time her skin started to erupt with a hard substance like a beetle's chitin shell that also spread across her flesh to form a sort of organic armour.

But then the Slayer Queen covered the distance in a single bound, landing precisely in the gap between the two vampires and her dark sister as they closed in. "Have you _both_ gone _nuts?_"

"It's not Faith!" snarled Angel, his eyes fixed on the creature behind Buffy who wore the Dark Slayer's visage.

"Yes I am!" contradicted Faith, bewildered and not a little hurt by Angel's reaction.

"She's Faith!" Buffy reinforced, shifting her bodyweight in readiness, even though a _genuine_ battle against Angel _and_ Spike was a feature of her nightmares, and one she was pretty sure she wouldn't win.

Angel hesitated uncertainly at the ringing conviction in Buffy's voice and the undeniable Faith-ness of…her?…its..?…body-scent; his face wavered between human and demon - had Faith been possessed by a demon host like Cordy…?

"No!" Spike extended his fangs impossibly further as he tried to edge around the blonde Slayer. "It's _there_, can't you _hear_ it? Something's there, inside, not Faith…"

Angel's wavering vampire face solidified again as his enhanced vampire sensory abilities picked up what humans couldn't detect, his voice dropping into an animalistic snarl. "Can hear it, smell it, _feel _it. Not Faith..."

Edging towards real panic, Buffy's jaw, like the penny, dropped as she suddenly figured it out at Angel's growled words. She looked at them – and laughed. Peals of merriment echoed around the room as the Slayer-Queen giggled, with more than a hint of hysteria. "Guys…of _course_ its Faith, you idiots. She's a _woman_."

Both vampires paused and looked at her, along with everyone else, clearly not getting it. "Guys…it's how people make more people...?"

Nothing. The clue-bus sailed on by. Trying to get a grip on her fear-tinged hysterical mirth, Buffy drew in a steadying breath –

Fred Burkle stepped forward into the gap so she was beside Buffy and also in the two vampires' 'line of fire', the blue colouration fading and her skin reabsorbing the armour to leave normal, warm pink flesh.

Her face woodenly devoid of expression and her voice emotionlessly flat but curiously threaded with an inflexion of sorrow, Fred said plainly: "Faith is pregnant."

Angel and Spike looked at each other. "Eh?"

"Pregnant; with child; gravid; in the club; up the duff; eating for two -" Andrew Wells babbled.

"_Okay, _grasping the concept!" rapped out Gunn.

"Is it normal?" blurted out Angel.

Giles visibly winced and the dark vampire found himself pinned by the furious glares of every female present.

"_Hey!"_ Buffy glared at Team Angel. "You guys _not_ helping here!"

"Faith, I'm sorry, that came out wrong –" began Angel.

"No it did _not_." Wesley slammed the heavy book down on the reception counter with considerable force – making everyone jump nervously again - before spitting out, "No offence, Faith, but last year Cordelia Chase was taken over by a demon so it could give birth to itself through her mystical pregnancy." He gestured towards the other members of Team Angel – Angel, Gunn, Lorne and Fred. "Therefore, since _our_ last experience with 'pregnancy' resulted in the death of one of my dearest friends after she spent months in a brain-dead coma, you'll just have to tolerate Team Angel's current lack of rejoicing!"

"Cordelia was our friend too." Buffy responded quietly into the uncomfortable pause as everyone found the floor suddenly fascinating.

"Cordelia wasn't our friend," Charles Gunn retorted, "she was _family_. We –" He indicated the LA group the same as Wesley had just done, "- are each one all the family we've got. Look, Faith, we're happy for you 'n'all, or we will be when we've thought 'bout it a bit more, but we're not really up to balloons and party streamers right now."

Dropping the defensive fight stance, the Dark Slayer rolled her eyes. "Everyone lighten up. I get where you're coming from and I understand it. I mean, what are the odds that any one of _us_ would manage to do something _normal_ without getting whacked upside the head with the big mystical whammy. But honestly…that's what this is." She waved a hand at Robin Wood. "There was a boy, there was a girl, there was the horizontal mamba…sperm met egg and voila, the next Miss Lehane is ruining my waistline as we speak. No mysticism or portents involved…"

"Except she's a Slayer." Dawn said chirpily before subsiding as a dozen glares were turned her way.

"Already…I thought that was a...you know…sweet sixteen kinda deal?" Spike asked, his gaze having been fixed on Faith's stomach for the past few minutes with a sort of fascinated horror, as if he expected her to go into labour any second.

"It appears the "one slayer dies a new slayer is called" theme has undergone some modifications since, or more likely because, we turned all the Potentials into Slayers." Giles answered. "It seems that a girl destined to be a Slayer will be a Slayer regardless of how old she is when a previous one dies. There are several Slayers that are minors, who are currently still living with their families. Mr Zubuto, Kendra's Watcher, is overseeing their training."

"Wait…" Lorne frowned. "Friday night when you were attacked by the Gra'ak…that power that helped Faith kill it even though her Slayerness hadn't returned…_that_ was your internal tadpole flexing her mystical muscles?"

Buffy threw out a hand towards Solange, who had been sitting serenely on one of the lobby banquettes like a queen, totally unfazed by the drama around her. "So it seems, and I quote our new BFF over there: "'_In the instant of her Calling, the Slayer gave to her mother her power that she could triumph.'_""

Fred, having been looking at Faith with a strangely bitter expression, frowned at this statement. "_Not_ Fallon Mady then?"

Wesley couldn't help himself from flinching slightly, but was saved by, of all people, Andrew Wells, whose long Spikesque trench coat actually _suited_ him as he moved forward and waggled his arm slightly to attract their attention. "No. Actually it was Kerry Lansing. _That's _what I found out from my Internet search, only about ten minutes before Xander called me to come back home and pick up the girls to drive down here, which I'm thinking, probably not a coincidence."

The apprentice Watcher smiled at the several knowing looks most people in the room exchanged. Nobody here believed in coincidences, or accidents, or happenstance, or serendipity – those were things that happened to _other_ people. "Kerry Louise Lansing, ten-year-old living at 32 MacLeod Terrace, Glasgow, Scotland, with mom, dad, brother and sister. Completely average family, completely unremarkable girl, except for…?" Andrew gestured with both arms, the palms of his hands outwards, towards the crowd, like a game-show host directing the camera to the contestant in the spotlight.

"…A history of insomnia and nightmares." Xander obligingly recited.

"Exactly!" Andrew declared. "Kerry Lansing had a history of night-terrors, but it was the only blip in an otherwise normal life, until…?"

"Last year when she suddenly underwent some major changes." Willow said this time. "We know where this story's going, Andrew. She was one of the Slayers I created with the Scythe."

"Right again." Andrew shrugged. "All of a sudden last winter, Kerry Lansing went from being an indifferent athlete to the darling of her school's PT department. Track, gym, team sports, it was like someone amped up her reflexes and coordination by a factor of ten."

"We get it!" Faith's harsh interjection made everybody jump slightly. "So…" Faith's dark eyes were eloquent in their pain, "…how did Kerry Lansing…?"

Nobody moved or spoke; this was the one thing nobody wanted to acknowledge – instead of being gutted by the Gra'ak, Faith instead was only alive because a ten-year-old girl had died and, in doing so, turned the foetus Faith hadn't even known she was carrying into a Slayer.

Andrew shrugged, losing his 'oracle' attitude. "On Friday night, Kerry Lansing, her brother and sister were being minded by their grandparents while their parents went out to a work function or something…a fire broke out in the house next door, which was empty because the family were on vacation and spread unchecked to the Lansing's house. With, and I quote: '_Superhuman strength',_ Kerry Lansing 'somehow' managed to save her brother, sister, grandfather and wheelchair bound grandmother from the blaze. The firemen couldn't understand how she'd managed to get through the smoke and heat without breathing apparatus as long as she did. The house collapsed while she was still inside…"

"Another compelling reason to get this show on the road, no pun intended," announced Wesley abruptly, "because the Oligarchs' _next_ victim may be a Slayer whom we don't yet know about, like we didn't know about Kerry Lansing."

"I agree." Giles seconded. "The Oligarchs' first two attempts were on Fallon and Faith, and though Fallon died, both attacks failed to work as they intended, so I think we have assume it was unintentional on the Oligarchs' part that both Slayers were already part of our Sunnydale group. We caught a huge break, and we need to capitalise on it."

In silence, everyone backed up off the lobby floor as Wesley and Willow shook the powder around to form a large circle, while in the centre, Giles and Fred placed the appropriate objects in the large ceramic bowl placed over the low fire that they had lit with scant regard for the lobby floor. On the floor next to the fire, close enough to warm the metal but not make it too hot, Giles placed a huge curved silver dagger, the hilt decorated with gems, which uncomfortably resembled the weapons of the First Evil's Bringers, before he and Fred exited the circle.

Wesley moved to the centre where the bowl's contents were simmering over the fire; the staircases that curved up from the lobby to the second floor were now thronged with Slayers who sat or stood looking down at him with faces that showed they seemed incredibly to be more nervous that he was. Not really expecting anything else, Wesley wasn't surprised when instead of seeking even that minimally safe distance, Team Angel and the Scooby Gang instead gathered around on the lobby floor itself, their feet just brushing the outer side of the powder circumference of the circle. Trying to look like he actually knew what he was doing, Wesley dropped to his haunches and picked up the ceremonial dagger before rising to his feet again. The hilt was warm in his grasp, and he didn't need to test the blade – this was a _functional_ ceremonial dagger used in rituals where sacrifices didn't consist of flowers and grain, but flesh and blood.

Angel stepped over the powder line into the circle, to stand the other side of the fire. "Everyone stay frosty while we're gone."

"Angel…" Wesley met the dark vampire's eyes.

"I've travelled the Ghost Roads before." Spike offered to his grandsire. "I could…"

"I need you ready to fight here." Angel cut him off, but there was appeal not hostility in his tone as he gave his grandson an encouraging smile. Turning slightly he ordered Buffy, "Be ready."

The slayer-Queen nodded, and they exchanged faint smiles. Angel had given her the order without self-consciousness or apology – he was no longer one of her Scoobies, he was the General in his own right now. "I get it."

Addressing everyone Buffy's voice automatically took on the same tone of command that Angel's own just – and just as unconsciously – had, "I want everyone on alert. If the Oligarchs have found out that we know about their little plan and figure we might try and stop them, some of their mystical muscle could be headed our way right now. Even if not, some other bad guys might have decided to jump on the Oligarchy bandwagon and help out in their own right. Spike, you, Faith and Dawn watch the front doors. Gru, you and Lorne and Olivia take the doors in from the garden. Willow and Kennedy with Harmony, you take the top of the left staircase, Fred and Gunn take the top of the right staircase. Have I missed anything?"

Wesley and Angel looked at each other. "Basement."

Angel pointed at the door that led up from the basement into the lobby and Buffy nodded. "Giles and Grey, please – go, Xander."

Xander saluted them all. "I'll be back before sunrise – remember – no apocalypses whilst the Xan-Man is gone," and he hurried out of the front doors past Spike, Faith and Dawn.

Giles and Grey moved into position either side the basement access door, leaving Buffy alone on the lobby floor, apart from Solange, who appeared content to merely watch proceedings with regal composure. Nobody bothered to ask what the slayer-Queen intended doing because they already knew – Buffy had taken the most dangerous task of all, that of monitoring the portal to the Ghost Roads and dealing with anything nasty that might emerge while Angel and Wesley traversed the Ghost Roads.

Gripping the dagger in his right hand, Wesley held his left hand over the bowl, fingers outspread, and sliced a shallow groove down his palm, handing the knife to Angel as a thin ribbon of blood welled from the stinging cut and dripped down into the bowl, where it sizzled and hissed ominously.

As the insect-like creature whose world had originally worshipped Jasmine before 'she' came to this dimension had so rightly said to Wesley, the most potent offering of all was blood. That any creature seeking to travel the Ghost Roads had to offer something of his, her or its body was what made them so dangerous, from the awesome power of each such profound offering, made uncountable times in an infinite number of dimensions. As Spike had explained to the Scooby Gang back when Glory intended to kill Dawn: "'_Blood is life_.'"

Consciously directing the blood in his own body to his left hand, and suddenly acutely self-conscious of it, Wesley having allowed both himself and Spike to feed before Buffy _et al _arrived at Wolfram & Hart, Angel likewise sliced his palm with the dagger, deeper to reach the blood he had and secure in the knowledge that within the next twenty minutes, his palm wound, unlike Wesley's, would have healed as if it had never existed. His blood – Wesley's blood originally – hit the bowl in meagre drops and it hissed and sizzled even more intensely. Angel tried to maintain his super-cool façade of mysterious élan, though her faint, amused smirk told him that Buffy was seeing right through to the nervousness underneath, but then Buffy had always seen what he was…which made the fact that she loved him all the more incredible.

Andrew let out a loud yelp on the left staircase as something diaphanous and white fluttered in front of him before disappearing. The translucent image of a woman dressed in the garb of a Roaring Twenties flapper, her features similar to those of Jodie Foster in _Bugsy Malone_, hovered on the outer edges of the circle. Buffy raised an eyebrow towards Wesley, who shrugged helplessly to indicate he was clueless. That some amongst the hotel's plethora of resident spooks might manifest themselves had always been something that swung more towards the 'certainty' rather than 'possibility' side of the pendulum. Unfortunately, other than Roaring Twenties lady, nothing was happening on the all-important _portal_ front.

"Maybe I should cut my hand again?" whispered Angel to Wesley, acutely aware of how perilously close the pair of them were to looking stupid in front of a whole battalion of Slayers.

"_Ohhhh_." Buffy's exclamation, in a tone of sudden comprehension, made them look up.

The flapper's form had solidified somewhat the closer she got to the circle. There were deep rents in her ghostly white dress from which started long grey blotchy stains. For anyone not yet on the clue bus her pearlescent arms and face likewise had deep gashes that were dark grey against the white; the flapper had been stabbed to death. In fact, considering the number and depth of the spectral wounds, 'frenziedly hacked' would have been a more accurate description.

As if she had been some sort of advance scout, more see-through apparitions coalesced in the vicinity of the circle. Wesley noted with academic interest that while some were indeed 'snow white', others ranged from old ivory through cream to perilously close to _beige_ in hue, and some managed to be so solid you couldn't see through them, while others retained near total translucence. They were elderly, middle-aged and youthful, of both Caucasian, Asian and Negroid ethnicity. Automatically Wesley noted the difference in styles that indicated different eras. A trio wore the heavy garb of 1920s workmen, presumably the three construction workers who had leaped to their deaths from the hotel's roof in 1928. Several of the spooks, wearing 1970s type flares and platform shoes, also sported gaping holes in their forms, some big enough to stick an arm through and waggle it about; doubtless victims of the last manager's 12-gauge wake-up call.

Buffy suddenly hissed, causing both Angel and Wesley to look behind them. Just a few inches away, a tiny glittering dot floating about a foot above the floor suddenly began to expand until it formed an opening in the shape of a church's arched window, a doorway with no door, the lintel and doorposts glowing gold; the base of the portal levitated about two inches of the marble of the lobby floor.

Wesley and Angel exchanged nervous glances; through the portal was an opaque swirling mist – pearl-white with sparkling glitter scattered through it – like thick fog. Angel narrowed his eyes but then shook his head – not even his vampiric eyesight could penetrate the mist.

Xander Harris suddenly uttered a swear word so vile that even Spike jerked his head around to give him a disapproving glare. Wesley saw and sucked air between his clenched teeth in reaction; right on the powder edge of the circle stood two extremely short ghosts, faded like old sepia photographs. Both in pre-World War II clothing, the little girl was no more than four years old; the little boy firmly holding her hand and bearing an equally solemn expression was barely a toddler. For a moment they could only gaze upon these silent witnesses to a far more terrible crime. The ghostly toddler craned his neck to look around Wesley's lower legs, which was the sum total of his height, looking at the portal with faint curiosity.

"Will some of them follow us through the portal?" Angel asked, eyeing the gathered spectres that nearly outnumbered the living crowd, and feeling ridiculously upset over the idea of these two tiny apparitions wandering the Ghost Roads.

"I believe some will." Wesley affirmed, looking at the waiting spectres. "But I don't think _they_ can until _we_ do..."

The moment of truth; Buffy gave them that special smile she gave when she was pretending that she wasn't worried about a friend in trouble. Side by side, Angel and Wesley stepped through into the mist.

_To be continued in Chapter 3…_

© 2006 & 2010, The Cat's Whiskers


	3. Chapter 3

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 3**

One last time, Philip Hewitt checked the old mansion over with infrared equipment, but no human-shaped heat signatures were present; admittedly the mansion had been built on a local viewing spot bluff that was a big reason in it surviving the Sunnydale earthquake, and was rumoured to have underground rooms in a cave/tunnel system below it, which his equipment would not penetrate being solid rock, but it was highly unlikely everyone resident had all gone down into the tunnels at the same time.

Placing the equipment in his holdall and getting out of his car, he made his way cautiously from the tree line through the rambling garden and up the short flight of stone steps to one of the French windows that led out onto this stone-paved deck. It was the work of moments to jimmy the old lock and ease inside without leaving any hint of forced entry.

Hewitt examined the room – a study – carefully. The teenage boy pointed out to him, Connor Riley, had been very helpful and totally unsuspecting when Hewitt pretended to be one of Buffy Summers' fellow Guidance Counsellors, hired to start in the Fall when the thrice-rebuilt New Sunnydale High School was due to re-open.

Hewitt had chosen the cover as a completely plausible scenario, since a variety of businesses were in the process of restarting operations in the town as it was gradually being reconstructed on the sides of the crater where the original town had once been, such as Willow Rosenberg's _Anya's Magic Box_ store. Another of Buffy Summers' close friends, Xander Harris, seemed to be doing most of the rebuilding, having no less than half a dozen crews working in different locations, with the townspeople more than happy to wait to get his small construction company on the go over faster, cheaper national conglomerates.

That was doubtless because, as Hewitt had clearly witnessed, Harris was well aware of what exactly was buried at the bottom of the Sunnydale crater, and the locals appreciated his grasp of the situation. The first two families to return to the area, other than the two Summers sisters, were Rabbi Aaron Rosenberg and Reverend Howell, the local Presbyterian minister, both of whom had hired Harris to construct their new homes, the completed examples of which had led to the town entire hiring Harris.

It could of course be pure chance that Xander Harris used holy water to make mortar when constructing with bricks. It could also be pure chance that he used reclaimed wood from Old Sunnydale's churches in his construction, or that he had incorporated into the designs of the Rosenberg's wooden house decorative gables that formed Stars of David, and that those of the Howell family formed crosses. It could be, but was highly unlikely.

Apparently, the Summers girls and their 'group' had gone to LA at short notice because of what Dawn had called a 'family emergency'; the boy Connor had referred to Dawn Summers' step-brother, 'Spike', though his tone had contained a certain irony inexplicable to Hewitt.

Of more importance, such an opportunity could not really be missed, even though he had no intention of ever needing to be this close to make the hit against Dawn Summers. Hewitt always cautiously ensured he remained on the periphery of his victim's lives: the next-door-but-one-neighbour; the casual acquaintance who drank in the same bar/shopped at the same mall; the colleague in the same department – that way he never moved from the cops' 'witness' lists to 'potential suspects' list. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that his target's sister was a _Slayer_, and therefore it was imperative that she should never believe her sister's death to be anything other than sheer cosmic mischance. Satisfied that the room contained no hidden cameras or such, Hewitt made his way to the next room.

From his perch high up in one of the trees whose height made it overlook the mansion, Connor watched the so-called Guidance Counsellor break in. Connor had always been able to get a vibe from people – for instance that scary lady in the UCLA library. He'd looked directly into Philip Hewitt's eyes and felt his hackles rise. Those eyes had been dead and empty, like glass replacements. Question was, what was Connor going to do when Dawn got back…?

_To be continued in Chapter 4…_

© 2006 & 2010, The Cat's Whiskers


	4. Chapter 4

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 4**

"Do you think we're falling?" Angel asked after a moment.

They were walking "forward" through the enveloping mist, which, apart from being slightly damp and well, _mist-like, _had proved no threat other than they were completely unable to see anything beyond about a foot away from their position in any direction, including above and below. Their feet appeared to be walking on mist, which was slightly disconcerting as well as not very stabilising to their equilibrium.

There was no sound, no smell, no horizon to focus on to orient themselves in time and space; they could be walking on solid…something, or they could be plummeting endlessly to very messy, splattering deaths through a vast void – there was simply no way to tell, and after pausing to consider the situation, Wesley said so.

"So these aren't actually the Ghost Roads then?" Angel clarified with more than a hint of relief in his tone.

"You've never travelled the Ghost Roads?" Wesley asked.

"There was never anything Angelus ever felt was worth the risk of doing it for." Angel admitted.

Meaning of course that it would have made more sense for Spike, who'd had experience, to accompany Wesley while Angel remained helping Buffy guard those gathered inside the Hyperion. Nevertheless, Wesley allowed this peerless opportunity for a "_logic, let me introduce you to this window_"moment pass. He understood certain aspects of Angel's personality better than the vampire himself; despite reaching accord with Spike, Angel had a strong tendency towards possessiveness and an 'Alpha Male' mentality. Spike had been allowed to live at Wesley's apartment, Wesley had allowed Angel's grandson to feed directly from him, etc., etc. Spike had travelled the Ghost Roads therefore Angel would travel the Ghost Roads.

"So, assuming we get there, what are the Ghost Roads like?" Angel asked, instinctively still trying to penetrate the swirling milky white clouds.

"Have you ever been in a plane, flying really high, and looked down and seen banks of white clouds below you?" Wesley replied, "Have you ever fancied that if the plane stopped you could almost have gotten out and walked to your destination across the clouds?"

"Uh…yes, actually."

"If someone took those clouds and elongated them into silver-white ribbons about twelve feet wide, that's what a Ghost Road –"

"Wha – " instinctively Angel threw up an arm as if to ward off the rays of the bright morning sun.

"- looks like." finished Wesley, pointing down.

The swirling mist didn't just stop, it ceased; one second they were enveloped in dense white mist, the next they were…on a silver-coloured ribbon about thirty feet off the ground? Angel looked around him. He and Wesley were standing on what appeared to be a smooth walkway. A sort of milky-off-white colour, the walkway had a faint silvery luminescence to it; it was indeed about twelve feet wide and stretched ahead as far as Angel could see. Nor was it alone, in the distance Angel could see other silvery ribbon-like walkways that criss-crossed this one's route. He looked behind him, and the walkway stretched back in the other direction as if they had just walked up it; there was no portal, no mist nor any sign that there had ever been either.

Angel took a couple of strides to catch up to Wesley, who had begun to walk along the Ghost Road without hesitation. It was slightly disconcerting when the Ghost Road literally went right through the upper branches of a large oak-like tree, yet Angel and Wesley also passed through the solid wood like it wasn't even there. In all directions Angel could see verdant hills and acres of lushly foliaged forests, and they could clearly hear birdsong and the rustle-chatter of small animals.

"This isn't our dimension, is it? This place…it seems, empty?" Angel ventured after a couple of minutes of no change in the scenery.

"I don't think any sentient life forms exist here." Wesley acknowledged.

"So where are we on the Ghost Roads then?" Angel frowned.

"Your guess is as good as mine. That's one of the many 'fun facts' about the Ghost Roads. Each portal opens at an entirely random point on a completely random Ghost Road at a totally random position on the space/time continuum. In short, a portal opens any _where_ and any _when_ on the Ghost Roads."

As Angel digested this, he saw the first other Ghost Road up ahead. It passed diagonally under this one by a gap of about five feet, but had no identifying features, being identical in appearance to the one they were already on. Wesley continued on walking and Angel saw that, just like a ribbon, the Ghost Road dipped and rose, curved and twisted in a meandering route.

It was completely unremarkable and appeared non-threatening and gave the sensation of almost walking on cloud, if clouds could ever be solid enough to support weight. Indeed, the edges of the walkway were actually sort of fuzzy and cotton wool-like in appearance, with faint floating wisps like frayed cloth. Close by a couple of larger 'vapour' spurs, each one side of the Ghost Road, curved in shallow U-shapes away from the walkway, dissipating into nothing within a few feet, vaguely resembling off and on-ramps…

"That's exactly what they are." Wesley confirmed just as Angel realised he'd been speculating aloud. "Anyone may get off or get on the Ghost Roads at any time."

"But you wouldn't advise it?"

"No, indeed."

"'Cause if it's that easy, why isn't _everyone_ using the Ghost Roads." Angel muttered, going a long way to answering his own question.

"People don't look for something they don't know is there." Wesley commented, "However –"

Whatever he was going to say never got said as suddenly they were somewhere else. Angel halted – there had been no warning, not even a split-second of notice. One micro-second, they were walking on the Ghost Road through a deserted primeval world, the next they were…

The sky was iron-grey, the atmosphere a heavy vapour, like blue smoke with a heavy acidic odour. Vast chasms separated an endless vista of soaring and clearly actively volcanic mountain ranges, slate grey and craggy, all sharp spires and jagged peaks or boiling lava calderas. Angel recognised it within a second, because he'd been here before. This was the home-world of the insectoid race that Jasmine had 'experimented' on before coming to Angel's dimension.

And the atmosphere was _fatal_ to humans. "Wes…" Angel hissed.

Wesley had continued to stroll forward as causally as if he were an Edwardian gentleman taking a post-luncheon stroll around Hyde Park before heading back to the Albany. "I'm all right as long as I'm on the Ghost Roads," he explained over his shoulder as Angel hurried to catch up.

"This is…"

"Jasmine's world." Wesley finished flatly, indicating with a nod of his head in a northwest direction.

Following his indication Angel looked and saw another familiar sight, a soaring granite mountain, far higher than any peak on Earth, atop which had been hewn out a crude stone temple. Staring out over the planet was a bas-relief sculpture of one of the indigenous crab-like creatures, except its upper torso and head were instantly recognisable as depicting Jasmine.

Angel glanced at Wesley again, using his supernaturally acute vampire senses to monitor that the Englishman was breathing normally despite that the atmosphere should have seared his lungs within seconds. Angel's face darkened as the memories came forward. Leaving his friends – his only real family – behind in that room, with his twisted son Connor and a whole host of LA SWAT trying to break through from the other side had tied Angel's stomach in burning knots as he prepared to take the orb and jump through the portal to this world, but as Wesley had pointed out, he had had no choice. The atmosphere of this world would have killed them all within minutes, meaning _probable _death at the hands of Connor was a still a better chance than _certain_ death from the searing air this side of the portal. Besides, Wesley had thrown his own words back at him: "'_Someone who knows the truth has to live through this_.'"

Angel's eyes unconsciously narrowed at the ex-Watcher a few yards ahead of him, as the vampire finally in this moment recognised the undercurrent of fatalistic resignation that was always present in Wesley's attitude, even in the inflexions of his dry wit and wry humour. Nor was it a by-product of Wesley's disastrous kidnapping of Connor. It had always been there since Wesley had joined Angel and Cordy to make Angel Investigations back up to a threesome after Doyle was killed; now Angel thought about it he could recall brief flashes of it right back even during Wesley's most intense Ultimate Nerd Moments. It was as if Wesley was privy to some weighty knowledge that nobody else was aware of, as if he knew it and accepted the burden of bearing it to such an extent that he no longer even noticed how it occasionally leaked out…

But maybe that was exactly what Wesley did. Angelus – and therefore Angel – spoke about forty demon dialects, but his only human languages were English and 18th Century Irish Gaelic, which there wasn't a lot of call for. Wesley was a mystical _scholar_, with all that implied. He spoke over two hundred human languages, both modern and ancient extinct, plus who knew how many demon tongues.

Wesley, just like Rupert Giles and all Watchers before them, had spent his entire life in that environment. In fact he'd been marinated in that culture from the cradle and you simply couldn't spend your whole life in that world, immersed in the in-depth study of books that qualified as _grimoires_ and _tomes,_ poring over thousands of these written receptacles of _arcane knowledge_ and _esoteric power,_ every last page saturated with the dark arts, without being severely affected on several levels. Wesley knew far more about the mystical world that Angel, as a vampire, was part of than it was healthy for anyone to know, or at least know about without becoming at the very least slightly eccentric, not to say downright peculiar.

With sudden clarity Angel realised the cause of that shared edge Wesley and Giles sometimes showed beneath the veneer of English stuffiness; with absolute certainty he knew that their dreams were as tormented as his own, nightmares flowering in the fertile soil of their minds, their eyes haunted by the memories of things that nobody should see, their hearts burdened with knowledge that was so terrible and painful it shouldn't be known. They couldn't escape being affected, regardless of how innocent or unworldly they had started out as – Angel felt pity and regret as he remembered that burgeoning edgy hardness displayed by the no-longer-quite-a-total-nerd Andrew Wells, that haunted, _knowing_ pain already clouding his eyes even as he had faced down Wesley _and_ Angel and took Dana Parvati from under their noses.

"How did we…change…we were on the same Ghost Road?" Angel asked.

"I have no idea." Wesley admitted. "The Ghost Roads operate under their own rules…assuming they operate in any systematic way at all." The Englishman stopped and looked down, considering the Ghost Road under them.

Angel waited patiently. Several other Ghost Roads had crossed over either below or above this one at various angles, and while no Ghost Road actually touched another, all were close enough so that you either jump down or clamber up from one Ghost Road to another. "We can just jump from Ghost Road to Ghost Road?"

"Yes. Let's try it." Wesley shrugged and jumped lightly down from the original Ghost Road they were on to this new one, which ran at a perpendicular angle to the first. Angel, unable to think why not, followed suit.

They continued to walk in silence for about ten minutes, 'passing through' several dimensions inhabited by creatures so alien that Angel couldn't even begin to describe them, though passing through wasn't quite the right description. It was as if the Ghost Roads ran alongside huge floor-ceiling cinema screens that had incredibly real images projected on them from an invisible projector room.

Angel rapidly tired of being in different dimensions with not so much as a flicker of warning. He tensed up each time and was constantly on edge, though Wesley seemed unaffected.

"How are we going to find anything useful like this?" He asked at last, aware of a definite snap in his own voice. "We don't even know what we're looking for –" Angel frowned at Wesley's alert posture and allowed a warning growl to enter his voice, "At least _I_ don't."

"I'm looking for – _that._" Wesley pointed.

Angel looked and then saw it. Meandering through the dimension they were currently in, which resembled a sort of Medieval Europe – lots of castles with pennants flying, men in armour charging around on huge horse-like things (they had fangs and clawed feet though) and women swathed in some truly impressive dominatrix-style corsetry fashions – was _another_ trail, but it wasn't a Ghost Road. It was a dirty dull orange hue, in fact it looked exactly like rust, an iron bar that had been left out in all weathers for a long time. It wasn't a trail or road at all, more like a little boy had put a greasy finger on a clean windowpane and pulled it across to leave a long, thin smear. However, just like the Ghost Roads it twisted and turned and went through solid objects like hills and trees. It reminded Angel of those shining mucus tracks left by snails as they crossed paving slabs in the garden, and he said so.

"That's what it is." Wesley replied. "There are many ways to travel from dimension to dimension other than portals and the Ghost Roads, especially if you're in a tearing hurry like the Oligarchs, but they're all identical in that they leave signs, a _signature_ if you will, like the signature that a spell always leaves, and if you do it right, you can detect that signature. We can't find the Oligarchs, but I did a spell to enable us to see where they'd _been_. Think of that rust-coloured ribbon as a plane's vapour trail or a speedboat's backwash – or a snail's mucus track."

"And if we follow it, we'll find the snail."

"That's the plan."

_To be continued in Chapter 5_

© 2006 & 2010, The Cat's Whiskers


	5. Chapter 5

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 5**

Justine Cooper tilted her head to one side alertly, her vantage point giving her a panoramic view of the immediate surround.

It hadn't taken rocket science to deduce that if a horde of Slayers were going to come a-calling on Angel in LA, the vampire would doubtless stash them at the Hyperion. For a Slayer, making her way onto the roof so she was positioned directly above the rotunda of the Hyperion's lobby had been child's play. She had settled herself down against the stone, looking down on those scurrying obliviously below her, the superb acoustics carrying their words to her effortlessly.

Justine had been amazed at the Slayers – even more so when Buffy Summers had turned up. Summers had been so _small_…and _young_. From this point, Justine hadn't been able to see the girl's eyes, but her combat training enabled her to notice the confidence with which Buffy Summers moved and spoke, the fluidity of her carriage and the leashed power in her voice. Buffy Summers was barely twenty-four years old, and she'd been a Slayer since she was sixteen; Justine found it a sobering realisation – at least she and Julia had each enjoyed a life of their own in their adolescence and twenties.

She had seen the blacked out vans draw up, their tinted windows distinctly illegal in LA, but instead of Oligarchy minions with big guns, they were in fact middle-aged men in suits who pointed parabolic microphones in the direction of the Hyperion. There was something familiar about them – a subtle air of stuffy…_ah, Watchers_. The Old Guard obviously, not the new group founded by Buffy Summers, trying to get a step ahead of the upstarts.

Justine grinned to herself. This was going to be very interesting. _Damn, I knew I should have brought popcorn_…

_To be continued in Chapter 6…_

© 2006 & 2010, The Cat's Whiskers


	6. Chapter 6

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 6**

"You've got to be kidding." Grumpily, Angel backed up a couple of steps and then sprang upwards the four feet of distance to the Ghost Road above this one.

"How do you think I feel?" Wesley retorted as he placed his arms on the Ghost Road above and pushed down onto his hands as he swung his leg up and onto the Ghost Road, clambering up and getting to his feet slowly as he lacked a vampire's unnatural agility.

This was the third time in five minutes they'd done this. The rust-coloured trail twisted more than a snake with a broken back, probably, as Wesley theorised, because the Oligarchs were trying to throw the Slayers off their trail, but it made tracking them exercise intensive as Wesley and Angel were forced to play Ghost Road leap-frog to keep up.

The one good thing was that the trail remained strong. At Wesley's request, Angel had looked at the trail when they first found it and his vampire eyesight showed that the trail in the left direction was a more vibrant rust-orange than the trail leading in the right direction. Like a plane's vapour trail, the track would eventually fade away and dissipate, the paler colour indicating that the Oligarchs had come from the right and were travelling left. So far, Angel's eyesight had been borne out by the strong colouration of the trail.

Suddenly struck by a thought, Angel looked at his watch and let out a yelp of alarm. "Wes', we've already been gone a couple of hours. How long can we search before we have to head back?"

"Forever." Wesley shrugged.

"_Whoa_." Angel reached out and grabbed the ex-Watcher's arm as the other man made to walk on. "You want to clarify that a little?"

Wesley gave him an inscrutable look but obliged. "What your watch says is meaningless. Time doesn't exist on the Ghost Roads."

"Doesn't exist as in…?"

"_Doesn't exist;_ neither linear chronology like our own dimension operates on, or simultaneous chronology, nor anything else. Time does not affect the Ghost Roads in any way, shape or form. As long as we remain _on_ _the Ghost Roads_, we could walk them with your watch marking the passage of a hundred years, even a thousand years, but as far as Buffy Summers, and Fred and all the others are concerned, we will return through the portal quite literally the moment we went in – to them it will be as if we stepped in, they blinked, and we stepped back out again."

"But if we leave the Ghost Roads?"

"Time re-starts, and to quote Spike, wackiness ensues."

"I don't follow." Angel was getting just a bit irritated with the things that Wesley hadn't bothered to explain _before_ they started this little jaunt. "Spill it, Wesley."

"Time moves differently in different dimensions, yes?" With a supreme effort of will, Wesley was able to swallow the example of Qor'Toth and said instead, "Like when Buffy was forced to send you to that hell dimension to close the portal Angelus opened? You're actually three-hundred-and-fifty years old because you were there for a hundred years, but in Sunnydale only a couple of months had passed?"

Angel swallowed, thinking of Connor – his baby son had been missing for just over three weeks in his dimension, but in Qor'Toth about sixteen years had passed, returning his infant son to Angel's dimension as a seriously pissed off, homicidal teenager; one Earth week was about equivalent to five Qor-Toth years, meaning that if Connor had been trapped in that dimension for six weeks, he'd have returned in his early thirties; if Connor had remained there for only just over three Earth months, he'd have come back a sexagenarian of retirement age!

"That's one of the many dangers of leaving the Ghost Roads. As long as you remain on a Ghost Road, Time is static – as far as those you left behind are aware, you've been gone less than a second. But if you _leave_ the Ghost Road, Time starts up again according to the physical laws of whatever dimension you are in, _not_ the one you came from. Unfortunately, there is no way for a traveller to correlate the chronology of the dimension they originated from with the chronology of whatever dimensions they visit, so that risk is always there. You could get off a Ghost Road, spend only an hour in another dimension, then return to the Ghost Road, whereupon time will stop again, but still get back to your own dimension only to find that hundreds of years have passed and everyone you cared about has been dead for centuries." Wesley warned.

_And you didn't consider that important enough to tell me? _Angel bit back his response, nodding as they continued walking, though he experienced an involuntary shiver at the scenario, which he had no doubt had occurred, probably frequently. Some explorer hopped off a Ghost Road into a nice dimension of flowers, fluffy clouds and fair maidens, only stayed for a half-hour, but then got back home to discover his loved ones had been dead for a century.

Though of course, Angel realised, Wesley had been intending to make this trip alone, so of course he hadn't seen the need to impart a whole raft of fun facts to his Imperious Leader. To be honest, Angel couldn't see what all the fuss was about really. As long as you kept your wits about you and had enough self-control to stay on the Ghost Roads away from the pretty luring distractions, you were –

"Spike!" Buffy's outraged tone had Angel spinning around. "Is this a date?"

Not ten yards away, the Slayer stood in an old warehouse that had clearly been a vampire nest, glaring at Spike who looked back at her pleadingly.

"What?" Angel muttered involuntarily.

"Ignore it." Wesley's grip on the vampire's arm was a lot harder than it needed to be, the Englishman's fingers digging into the dead flesh.

Though not nearly as painful as if he had had human-sensitive nerve endings and full blood volume in his veins, Angel was still distracted enough to turn and glare at Wesley, who lessened the force of his grip not a jot and instead tugged at the vampire with some force. "Come on, ignore it."

"What is it?" Angel allowed himself to be led on, but his feet involuntarily slowed as he watched, almost like someone viewing a movie, the Scooby Gang's attempts to thwart Glory's search for "the Key".

"The past, or rather, our dimension's version of the past. The Ghost Roads pass through all dimensions and all points in time…" Wesley hesitated, then added, "…and all possibilities in all alternate realities. This is the past as it happened in _our_ particular dimension." Resolutely, Wesley kept his eyes from what they were seeing.

To continue walking was torture, and though Angel did so, he couldn't _not _look. Vampires had a lot less bodily fluids than humans – the human form that sustained the demon within was maintained by mystical power – but Angel's tear ducts responded as he watched the great love of his life throw herself off the tower to save her sister. Like a movie Angel and Wesley could not pause, the scenes went on.

Angel was aware of how he was clenching his jaw as he saw the beginning of the dark relationship between Spike and Buffy after her resurrection, and was aware of how Wesley's heart rate had increased. The parallels between Buffy and Spike's destructive affair and Wesley's unhealthy relationship with the late Lilah Morgan were pretty obvious, but as things went on, what Angel's eyes saw caused his anger not to lessen, but change focus – towards Buffy.

Despite their still-new relationship of mutual respect and, even, awkward affection, Angel had continued to lay the blame for Buffy's fling with Spike squarely at the blond vampire's door, something similarly done by everyone else – Giles, Xander, Faith, etc.,_ -_ and it was a supposition Spike had never tried to defend himself against.

They saw the demon Sweet make everyone sing, heard Spike's bitter acknowledgement that Buffy felt she could whisper in his dead man's ear and it wouldn't be real because Spike didn't count. Angel winced as Buffy back-handed Spike across his crypt, causing the bleach-blond head to connect with a distinct _crack_ against the stone of the sarcophagus housing the crypt's original inhabitant, but Spike merely clambered slowly to his feet. He caught the bleak glance Wesley shot him when the ex-Watcher thought Angel was concentrating what was happening, but Angel recognised that what he and Wesley were witnessing was a textbook example of domestic violence – the twist being that the 'drunken asshole with vicious fists' spouse of the two was _Buffy_ and not Spike.

Wesley slowed, then stopped, looking down. Following his gaze as a way to stop looking at the living past, Angel saw that the rust 'trail' had expanded in one spot, going slightly bulbous before carrying on. There was nothing fascinating about it…was there?

"Yes, actually." Wesley contradicted. "That slight bulbous bit, looks like a little puddle, means the Oligarchs stopped here for some time, observing."

"They saw this?" Angel felt slightly nauseous.

"I imagine they were seeking any information on how to _reverse_ what Willow did in her creation of dozens of Slayers. Their spells were so specific that they must have seen something relevant to the creation of the First Slayer by the Shadowmen to start by simply trying to straightforwardly reverse that process." Wesley suggested. "They obviously never looked beyond the surface of whatever they saw, which hopefully will buy us enough time to spike their guns – no pun intended."

"What deeper meaning is there?" Angel commented bitterly – irrationally angry at no longer being able to blame Spike for what had happened between the blond vampire and Buffy.

Wesley regarded him for a moment with one of those inscrutable looks and then said softly, "Angel, what we've just seen – imagine for a moment that Spike is a stranger to you. You don't know him. What would you think? What would you feel?"

Angel hesitated. "I'd feel sorry for him, I wouldn't understand how he could stay with someone who treated him so badly, or why he didn't retaliate -" _and give her the ass-kicking her spoilt brat diva attitude so richly deserved._

"Precisely. _We_ know Spike. We've witnessed his unswerving loyalty to someone he cares about, and that he will tolerate inhumanly vicious abuse from that someone – Angelus, Drusilla…_Buffy _– without retaliation, even though he _could_ do something about it if he chose to. But the Oligarchs _didn't _see power restrained or the strength of forgiveness; they merely saw _weakness_, they saw just a victim of the Slayer Bitch. They looked, but they did not _see_. That means they've seriously underestimated what Spike is capable of, and hopefully they've made the same mistake with _all_ of us."

Angel digested this; uncomfortably aware of how Wesley had included Angelus in his list, with good cause. Angelus had Sired a few offspring, but not many, for few came up to his exacting standards of 'worthiness', and none of his few 'sons', now all dusted, had shown the potential of his favourite grandchild, Spike. Angelus was ferociously possessive of what was 'his', and though he'd shown Spike great affection and camaraderie, he'd also inflicted torture and cruelty on the younger vampire.

"If I'd been in Spike's place…" Angel couldn't quite bring himself to admit he'd have given Buffy Summers as good as she'd tried to dish out, much as he loved her.

"I understand…" Wesley shrugged. "Maybe that's what made Spike capable of _earning_ back his soul, when so many others who might try would fail. As the Lord said unto Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, "_Return your sword to its place_," because He knew really who had the power. He was the Son of God, all He had to do was raise one eyebrow and twelve Legions of Angels would have annihilated the entire solar system in an instant for Him."

"Comparing Spike to Him," Angel felt a strange tingle as his inner demon shrank away from the prospect of him even _thinking_ about uttering that Holy Name, "is a little _extreme_, but I get your point."

Wesley shrugged. "It's simple – being a seven stone weakling and letting someone kick sand in your face is one thing because you've got no choice, you're not capable of fighting back. Being Arnold Schwarzneggar and _letting_ someone kick sand in your face without retaliating is something else entirely."

"Spike!" Buffy's cry of alarm as Spike, tied to a chair in the Summers' home, contorted and twisted in rage, sounded again as new scenes began to be displayed.

The scenes progressed, not ignorable, as Wesley and Angel, jaws firmly set, continued on the Ghost Roads, following the rusty signature of the Oligarch's passing as closely as they were able:

The arrival of the Potentials with a world-weary Giles…Dawn's bittersweet joy when she thought _she_ was a Potential, helped by Xander Harris when it turned out she wasn't: _Seven years, watching my friends grow more powerful – the witch, a demon, Oz…and I'm just the guy who fixes the windows. They'll never know how tough it is for the rest of us…the ones who __**aren't**__ chosen. To always stand so close to the spotlight but never step in it. I see more than anyone realises…because no-one's watching me…_Spike had been right when he named Xander his hero, Angel thought.

_There is always a price…_humbly, Angel acknowledged that he had often not considered the price that _others_ paid. Neither he, nor Buffy, nor Gru, nor doubtless many 'heroes' had ever given much thought to what their sidekicks suffered, people like Xander, Willow, Giles, Wesley, Gunn, Lorne, Fred, Doyle, Cordy, because none of those were in the spotlight, none of those were on the pedestal marked Champion, but it didn't make what they endured less painful, or their contributions less valid…

…The suicide of Chloe the Potential, followed by Buffy's abortive trip back to the Shadow Men, whose attempt to infuse her with more demonic energy had ended so badly, and the cracks beginning to show as Buffy lashed out at those around her, reclaiming pitifully little ground when she managed to get Andrew Wells to close the Seal of Danthalzar, not with his blood but with his tears for having murdered Jonathan Levinson…

…The estrangement between Giles and Buffy after the Watcher went behind Buffy's back and collaborated with Robin Wood in the Principal's vengeance vendetta - oh yes, that was definitely Ripper. Again Angel was forced to ask himself the uncomfortable question – would he have been able to show the same restraint Spike had? Letting Wood off the hook with just a few hard-hitting home truths instead of taking what many would deem the sensible precaution of eliminating an enemy?

Then Crazy Caleb and Faith had arrived on the scene, and they saw Willow transform the girls into Slayers…Angel sucked in a breath as the Turok-Han attacked…

"_I love you…_" Buffy whispered, clasping hands with Spike despite the flames that ignited, the fire beginning to consume his body.

"_No, you don't._" Spike smiled at her gently. "_But thanks for saying it…_"

Angel found himself clenching his teeth, his jaw aching as she raced away, as they all raced away, his crazy, idiotic hero of a grandson, being burned alive in unendurable pain, grinning at the Turok-Han as if it were just a big party… "_I want to see how it ends!_" For a moment, Spike almost seemed to look directly at his grandsire as he tilted back his head and laughed, throatily, even as blackened spots began to spread across his cheeks and his body was consumed in the inferno.

"_Flash-fried saving the world…_I'll have to remember Spike's tendency towards understatement." Wesley commented dryly, obviously recalling Spike's throwaway comments that had always implied a sort of 'instant inflammatory whoosh, game over'.

Angel bit his lip; there had been no mercifully speedy flash…Spike's death had been slower and much more agonising. Had the Oligarchs seen this? If so, how could they continue to see Spike as weak and venal? Resolutely Angel pushed away the images of what he'd just seen…they could – and would – haunt him later.

_To be continued in Chapter 7_

© 2006 & 2010, The Cat's Whiskers


	7. Chapter 7

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

Chapter 7

Gradually, Angel noticed that the rust-coloured trail became less twisting and continued for longer periods in straighter lines, and mentioned this to Wesley, who admitted that it probably _was_ significant. "With luck we're homing in on their bolt-hole. They might have believed themselves so successful in throwing off pursuit that they're getting careless about laying a false trail."

Angel nodded, glancing at his watch again, which incredibly claimed that twelve hours had passed since he and Wesley had entered the portal though if Wesley were right, as far as Buffy and the others were concerned, they'd entered barely a second ago. He frowned – he himself didn't feel tired or hungry, though of course that meant very little. Human physiology operated on a basic "system of three" – humans could survive three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air – whereas vampires could comfortably last several days without feeling the need for sleep or even hunger.

However, Wesley didn't evince any sign of hunger or fatigue either. Presumably the fact that Time didn't exist on the Ghost Roads meant that besides the traveller not ageing, they also never got any hungrier or more tired than they had been when they stepped through a portal to get here? But in that case, shouldn't Angel's wristwatch have stopped the instant he was on the Ghost Roads, or did the mystical forces not apply when it came to inanimate –

His superb eyesight automatically scanning ahead, Angel hissed involuntarily as he saw a large, green-skinned biped striding towards them on the same Ghost Road. A chill slithered down his spine: _Ethros_. The words of the aged nun to himself back in the case of the possessed boy Ryan echoed, "'the Ethros is even more dangerous than _you_.'" Her words were true; the Ethros were one of the few demon species that vampires feared, and even powerful vampires like the Master and Kakistos had made it a point to avoid them.

"Wesley," Angel warned, allowing his fangs to erupt.

"Yes, I see it." Wesley said without concern.

"You do _recognise_ it?" Angel demanded with a hint of asperity.

"The Ethros can't harm us…nor can _we_ injure it." Wesley added dryly taking in Angel's protruding fangs.

"Really, considering we're about to have a major invasion of personal space, _are you sure?_" Angel challenged.

"Angel, I'm sure. No traveller can be _forced _off, or onto, a Ghost Road. You have to _choose_ to leave, or to get on, nor can any traveller suffer physical harm from another. Every traveller, as long as they remain _on_ a Ghost Road, is by that very fact rendered both immortal and invulnerable."

The Ethros slowed when it saw them and it bared impressively pointed teeth, but it made no attempt to attack, which it would have done in the real world; instead, they sort of sidled past each other with the Ethros and Angel exchanging malevolent looks. However, as they reached the point of closest proximity, Angel felt a sort of strange invisible pressure against his skin, like he'd felt before, back on that submarine in World War II…unhappy memories…but something told Angel that if he tried to attack the Ethros that invisible pressure would act like a Star Trek force field and protect the demon.

He scowled after the demon, something about it nagging at him as Wesley, with an obvious glare, continued to walk on at a faster pace that clearly said he wasn't in the mood to stick around for Angel's macho posturing.

"Waterloo!" Angel exclaimed as they walked through yet another dimension that was heavy on primeval jungle and light on sentient life.

"_What?_"

"I've just realised. The Battle of Waterloo was in 1815 –"

"While I'm pleasantly surprised by your knowledge of broader history –"

"What knowledge? I was _there_. I'm talking about that Ethros. I've just realised what was bugging me about it – what it was wearing was considered hopelessly old-fashioned in demonic _haut couture _even back _then_. How long has it been walking the Ghost Roads?"

"Impossible to say, but probably centuries, possibly millennia. Walking the Ghost Roads – assuming you manage to both _survive_ the experience _and _remain _sane_ _– _is probably a sure fire way of beating your enemies. The theory is that you just wait until everyone who wants to kill you is dead, then re-emerge as your own great-great-whatever…"

"And in practice?"

"Like I said – not only surviving but also not going nuts in the process."

"Wonderful."

"No, not really."

"_That hair, that manly stubble. If I swung that way, I'd go for Wes myself!"_

Angel jumped as his own sneering words suddenly cut across their current conversation and his heart sank as they found themselves walking past the huge "Imax-screen" images of the past yet again, only this time from LA not Sunnydale. This had happened last year - Angelus was in his cage, taunting Fred and Wesley on the stairs; relief swept over Angel as he realised that Connor was not in the image; the last thing he needed right now was for them to see _Connor_ and have Wesley turn and demand to know, with understandable astonishment, _who was that strange kid, and why was he calling you 'dad'?_

He winced as Angelus burst out of the hotel to catch Wesley and Faith off guard, grasping the Englishman effortlessly, despite him being the new harder, colder, honed and toned Wesley, not the nerd of yore; Angelus taunting Faith to attack him _before _he could snap Wesley's neck. Both Angel and Wesley unconsciously began to walk faster, instinctively seeking to leave this reality behind, although the telltale pooling of the rust-trail into a "puddle" showed that the Oligarchs had paused here…

Though - had they seen what Angel saw? The dark vampire frowned. The Oligarchs hadn't travelled the Ghost Roads as he and Wesley were doing, rather they'd leap-frogged in 'hops' from dimension to dimension, though they had left a mystical "fingerprint" trail behind that someone on the Ghost Roads could follow. But if every portal opened at a completely random place/time on a completely random Ghost Road, and each Ghost Road meandered without plan through an entirely chance set of dimensions and realities, then it would be impossible to know what the Oligarchs had witnessed and vice versa. There was nothing to say that they had seen the same things or even the same dimension that that Angel and Wesley were seeing –

The ear-splitting crash jerked Angel's attention back to the scenes he was trying not to look at, but he stopped dead as Wesley ducked under Angelus's blow and lashed out with a snap-kick that sent the vampire staggering back.

Angel stared at the fight – _this had never happened_; Angelus had battled _Faith_, finally defeating the Dark Slayer – or not, for it had been a deliberate plan by her and Wesley to drug him with Orpheus, a plan that had worked perfectly, though it nearly killed Faith in the process.

"_Ignore it_." Wesley's voice was a rasp, his eyes haunted with things too terrible to speak.

"Wes', this didn't _happen_." Angel resisted the Englishman's attempts to pull him along by the simple expedient of refusing to move – Wesley was a lot more athletic and dangerous now than he'd ever been, but Angel's unnatural vampire strength was still far more than that of any human.

Angel watched in astonishment – he knew from five years of personal experience that Wesley Wyndham-Pryce was both a ferocious and very skilled fighter, something that had long led him to suspect Wesley's initial "clumsy nerd" attributes when Angel and Cordy had met up with the ex-Watcher in LA were nothing more than a camouflaging smoke-screen designed to appease whatever local 'Alpha male' was beating his chest that Wesley W-P was an insignificant bunny rabbit not even worth noticing. What was that old saying about the quiet one always being more dangerous that the one yelling and bellowing? In this fight that had never occurred, Wesley was certainly taking it to Angelus with vigour.

For five minutes chaos reigned as Wesley gradually worked his way towards the exit of the warehouse complex, giving Angelus some nasty blows. Then another vampire suddenly jumped out of the shadows, hitting Wesley broadside and sending him flying to collide with Angelus, the trio going down in a tangled heap of flailing limbs. The new vampire's triumphant screech to Angelus that he had "got the human for him" ended in a shriek of pain as Wesley, pinned between the two undead, slapped a cross against the younger vampire's cheek while simultaneously trying to drive a stake into his chest. He missed the heart but the screeching vampire surged up and scrabbled away clutching his cheek, while Wesley dove the other way and Angelus surged up like a shark from the ocean.

Furiously Angelus wrenched out the stake, causing the vampire to give another yelp of pain that was never completed as Angelus drove the stake directly into his heart and he exploded into a cloud of dust. Lunging forward, Angelus grabbed Wesley by the hair of his scalp with one fist, pulling back the Englishman's head with that arm as the other helped to hold the Englishman, whose gasping breath bespoke at least one broken rib. Wesley gripped Angelus's forearm with both hands, but the vampire was impossibly stronger.

"No." Wesley's arm was a bar across Angel's body as the vampire prepared to launch himself forward.

"I have to –"

"_No._" Wesley moved in front of him and gripped Angel's forearms with both hands tightly, his eyes black with anguish. "This isn't _real_."

Behind the watcher, Imax-lite ran on as Angelus lowered his head, trying to hold the squirming ex-Watcher still, biting his neck and then jerking away with a curse as one-handed Wesley did the cross thing to his face. He yelped and loosened his hold as Wesley played Angelus' own game and sank his teeth deep into the nearest available vampire anatomy – Angelus' arm. Wesley lunged forward in a smooth roll as Angelus flinched back, but the Englishman's broken ribs weren't up to the task; he failed as he tried to get to his feet and Angelus wasn't anywhere near incapacitated.

The vampire repeated his previous action, this time wrenching the cross out of Wesley's hand. Instead of feeding, Angelus tore at his own wrist with his teeth and then bent his head and bit into Wesley's neck again, tearing the skin as the ex-Watcher kicked and writhed. Angelus gulped the blood eagerly as Wesley's struggles lessened, raising his wrist and pressing it against the Englishman's mouth, but Wesley twisted his head away, pressing his lips tightly together.

"_Damn ye, ye'll feed!"_ Angelus' Irish accent broke through in his rage, and he brutally held the Englishman immobile, shoving his torn wrist between Wesley's lips with a pressure that forced the Englishman to open his mouth or have his jaw break. Involuntarily Wesley breathed in, gagging and choking as the blood entered his mouth, and with a snarl, Angelus bit deeper, greedily gulping the blood like a child eating chocolate. Slowly Wesley stopped struggling, and suddenly he slumped in Angelus's grasp, his eyes wide and sightless.

"_No no no nono._" Angel shook his violently from side to side, rejecting what he was seeing – this was madness, this hadn't happened, this had – _only existed in Angel's darkest dreams, the dreams where Angelus could assert himself and indulge in his daydreams, not Angel's…_

Another loud crash echoed in the warehouse and Angelus's head jerked up. Charles Gunn's voice, and Faith's - searchers, trying to find the vampire, unaware of the murdered Englishman…and so they would remain, until it was too late. Placing the Englishman's body over his shoulder in a classic fireman's lift, Angelus leaped up to a catwalk with superhuman strength, exiting the warehouse before the searchers were aware that he had ever been there.

Lightly as though unencumbered, the monster carried the dead Englishman back to a small, shabby one-bed open plan apartment whose blood-spattered walls told eloquently what had happened to it's original resident, dropping Wesley's body on the bed like a sack of potatoes, before going to the bathroom and cleaning himself off, whistling cheerfully.

Redressing himself, Angelus entered the main room, just as the body on the bed twitched. Pushing himself from his sprawled position, the vampire that had been Wesley Wyndham-Pryce looked at his Sire solemnly for a moment, and then smiled. Rising from the bed, Wesley made for the door.

"I didn't say you could leave." Angelus' tone was soft but dangerous.

"Trust me, you'll like what I have in mind." Wesley responded coolly, not appearing fazed by the implicit threat in his Sire's voice.

"I'd better." But Angelus smiled at his latest child's strength. "Lead on, MacDuff."

Angel could only watch, held back by Wesley – the real Wesley – as the two vampires left the dingy apartment, the vampire Wesley talking to Angelus in a tone too low for even Angel to pick up, but which made the evil vampire laugh aloud and throw an arm round Wesley's shoulders. Angel was aware of the ferocity of grip with which his Wesley was holding him back from leaving the Ghost Roads; Wesley's eyes were sunken black pools in a putty-grey face – _he knows what's coming next, _Angel thought abruptly, _somehow he knows where they're going and what they're going to do…_

The Hyperion loomed and Angelus slowed his pace so he walked a few steps behind Wesley, so totally cloaked by the shadows of the deep night that he might have dissolved into the air itself. Both vampires, with Wesley ahead, simply walked up the path into the hotel – it was a public building, and Angel as the 'resident' didn't count as he was already dead. Wesley stood atop the steps, barely two feet away from Gunn, Lorne, Lilah and Fred as they gathered at the entrance, his face sombre, the pump-action shotgun resting on one shoulder.

"Damn." Gunn commented on seeing Wesley's unsmiling face.

"Indeed." Wesley moved so fast none of them even saw it – even as he broke Gunn's neck, the pump action shotgun was fired full blast into Lorne's torso, tossing the green demon back onto the stairs. Neither Lilah nor Fred even had time to blink or even register what was happening. Lunging forward to grab Lilah to him with one powerful arm, Angelus snatched up the sword falling from the hand of Gunn's still collapsing corpse and decapitated Lorne with one savage stroke, ensuring real death for the demon since his body was mutilated.

"Congratulations, Lilah, you're about to become my boy's toy." Angelus laughed as he sank his fangs into Lilah's throat.

Still with that faint British reserved smile, Wesley smashed his fist into Fred's face, knocking her to the lobby floor in a stunned heap. Ensuring he had forced Lilah to accept sufficient blood to Sire her, Angelus made himself comfortable on the steps grasping her corpse as Wesley brutally raped and tortured Winifred Burkle to death.

Angel gave a sobbing breath as the Ghost Road was suddenly in a dimension that strongly resembled Pylea. Beside him, Wesley was shaking, fine tremors wracking his body, but no tears fell down his cheeks. Dragging in a rasping breath, Wesley looked at his own watch. "We haven't got all night – the Oligarchs might jump dimensions again, or even discover we're here looking for them."

"You didn't – I could have – _I would have saved you_!" yelled Angel, sending Wesley staggering back with a wild shove borne of grief and horror.

"It wasn't _real!_" Wesley shouted back savagely. "Forget being the superhero for once, and focus!"

"But –!" Angel began to exclaim. 

Suddenly looking exhausted, Wesley rasped, "_Angel_, wake up and smell the O Neg! Haven't you heard what I've been saying? Why do you think the Ghost Roads are so fearsomely dangerous if no traveller upon them can be _physically _harmed?"

Angel hesitated, opening his mouth and closing it again; when he'd accompanied Wes' on this trip, right from the very beginning, he'd always thought of "dangers" in terms of real injury or literal attack, like tangling with that Ethros back there. Once Wesley had explained that the Ethros couldn't hurt them, Angel had privately begun to assume that the Ghost Roads' legendary terror was exaggerated.

Accurately discerning Angel's thoughts, Wesley ground out, "The Ghost Roads are so terribly dangerous because while they can't destroy you, they can get you to destroy _yourself_. What would you have done if I hadn't been here?

"Attacked Angelus." Angel said promptly, before thinking for a second and adding hesitantly, "Left the Ghost Road…"

"Exactly, where you would instantly have been open to attack and the effects of Time. The Ghost Roads show what was, what is and what may be, _but_ they can also show you your deepest fantasy and your worst nightmare. Let me ask you – if you'd seen a dimension where Cordelia lived but Angel was killed…"

There was a pregnant pause and Wesley raised an eyebrow.

"I would have been tempted to go – and stay." Angel admitted heavily.

"Get it through your head, Angel." Wesley lectured sternly. "What we are currently standing on is far more dangerous than an Ethros demon, far more of a threat to you than Holtz ever was."

"But…how can you be sure it wasn't _real._" Angel almost wailed in anguish.

Wesley looked away for a moment, his expression bleak. "Because that was _my_ nightmare. That Angelus wouldn't simply kill me, but turn me instead. I knew if that if he did, I could simply walk brazenly into the Hyperion, none of the others would suspect a thing until it was far too late. It was part of Angelus' plan to turn me into a vampire, wasn't it?" Wesley's tone made the last sentence more of a statement than a question.

"Yes." Angel conceded flatly. Wesley had all the attributes Angelus considered desirable in a Sireling: highly intelligent, courageous and a skilled fighter but also cunning, a good strategist – and possessing a deep streak of ruthlessness, that 'dark river of the heart' that so few had. "Do you…dream it a lot?"

"No so much. It depends…when Illyria killed Fred, there were a bad few weeks – we both know how close to the edge I was during that time. Before Willow restored your soul it was nightly. Now, not really." Wesley shrugged and then prompted, "Angel we really have to go."

They moved on, but now their gait had become more of an urgent stride than a measured walk – Angel had no desire to be here a second longer than he had to, and once this caper was over, he never intended to go near a Ghost Road again even if he lived ten thousand years instead of just a century!

Unseen by Wesley ahead of him, he shivered. He hadn't really understood – no, he hadn't truly _accepted_ - the dangerousness of the Ghost Roads, until now. Like Lorne was always complaining about Pyleans, his view of 'real' danger was physical – the sharp axe, not the enraged or disturbed mind, or a slanderous tongue tearing apart friendships.

When those images had started playing, he'd been uncomfortable and irritated – rather than rehashing past events, why couldn't the Ghost Roads show something useful – like what Lindsey MacDonald was up to now, or the evil lawyer's past machinations or future schemes. Something that Angel could have worked with…right now, he was immensely grateful that the Ghost Roads _hadn't_ done any such thing.

_If I'd ever tried this on my own…I'd never have made it. _The knowledge was humbling but inescapable; he would have either given into temptation to remain in a dimension where Cordy had lived…or where he and Buffy could walk in the sun…or else he would have reacted with instinctive emotion to a fake scenario like the brutal one they'd just witnessed, borne of Wesley's nightmares, and dived straight off the Ghost Roads into who knew what…

Continued in Chapter 8

_© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers_


	8. Chapter 8

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

Chapter 8

Once again the dimension view changed. LA could be seen as a backdrop behind the grassy promontory. On a large chequered cloth, Wesley and Fred lay side by side in the sun; some distance away, Lorne, Gunn, Gru and Spike were indulging in a game of Frisbee, the blond vampire seemingly oblivious to the sun, whilst Giles, Xander, Willow and Gwen Raidan sat on the grass nearby, Giles buried in a book; some distance further, Robin Wood walked next to Faith, and between them a small, curly haired toddler wobblingly walked. To the left, Angel saw himself and Buffy side-by-side – smiling, happy, in full sunlight.

"Is this real?" Angel wondered bitterly, unaware he had spoken aloud until Wesley answered.

"It could be the future, or it _could_ just be your fantasy. There's only one way to tell, and if you get it wrong…"

Angel ignored the beguiling scene with ease – _lesson learned_, he was fully and unilaterally on board.

Once again they were in a different but familiar dimension – the past once again, but again a past that _had_ happened. Angel watched Wesley watch impassively as Faith and past Wesley entered the demon bar where Angelus had been holding court until harassed by the telepathic communication from Cordelia, or rather Jasmine within her, with Faith pounding the horned demon in the bar and Wesley casually shooting the other demon in the face. The Dark Slayer went into the Orpheus den at the back, followed by – _her Watcher_, Angel realised.

"The Orpheus idea was inspired," he praised now.

"It was the only thing I could come up with. The Watcher Diaries never mention Angelus being in one of the mystical drug dens, so I assumed he'd never used it enough to be addicted."

_And therefore build up a tolerance for it._ "Just because Orpheus is mystical doesn't make it any less like any other drug – it takes your control away, until you are the dog and the drug is the master." Angel shrugged. "Angelus tried a couple of times, but he didn't like the loss of control over himself."

The cry of the drug den girl echoed as Wesley ruthlessly stabbed her in the shoulder as Faith protested. Furious, Faith stalked out of the narcotic laden air of the den into the back alley, clearly angry with Wesley. The two began to argue over his tactics. Watching the event now, Angel silently had to agree with the past-Wesley's claim that Faith needed to tap into the old Faith, Mayor Richard Wilkins _evil_ pet Slayer, in order to have a hope of catching Angelus.

"I remember what you did to me, Faith." Wesley said coldly, "The shallow cuts so I'd stay conscious…"

Angel winced in empathy even as he sympathised with Faith as she shook her head frantically, protesting that she couldn't be like that anymore.

Wesley glared at his Slayer. "You haven't changed! You _can't_ because you're _sick_. You've always been sick; it goes right down to the roots, rotting your soul. That's why your friends turned on you in Sunnydale, why the Watchers tried to kill you. No-one trusts you. You're a rabid dog who should have been put down years a–"

Faith slammed him back against the chain-link fence, her supernatural slayer strength bringing her hand within a millimetre of crushing his throat as she choked off his words before suddenly releasing him with a haunted face.

"There, that wasn't hard." Wesley commented with total _sangfroid_.

"_Shit_." Wesley on the Ghost Road now said, in a tone of exasperated realisation.

"What? _What?_"

"I just realised something, that's all. When we get back I need to talk to Faith. Really talk to her…" Wesley muttered.

"What?" pressed Angel, unwilling to risk any more nasty emotional surprises.

Wesley sighed, "Xander told me that Faith is having some 'issues' about her pregnancy that I've doubtless contributed to. As Faith's Watcher – "

"You're not her Watcher now." Angel was unable to stop the words slipping out; uncharitable, certainly unheroic, as he knew his attitude to be, his less admirable side didn't want Wesley taking up his old role out of a sense of duty to the Dark Slayer. Wesley belonged here in LA, not in Sunnydale.

Cursing the slip of his tongue caused by his current situation with Justine Cooper, Wesley nevertheless stood firm as the dark vampire bristled possessively. "I realise that, but as Faith's most recent _surviving_ Watcher and her _friend_, I have a duty to help ease her mind if I can."

There was a tone in Wesley's words Angel could not decipher, a sort of double meaning as if he wasn't just referring to Faith. For a moment, Angel did not speak as they continued on the Ghost Road in tense silence but then he asked, "Is that what you intend to do…after? I mean, _assuming_ I do the right thing during the Apocalypse and _assuming _the good guys actually win and _assuming_ the Shanshu's promise of me being human again isn't just a crock of bullshit to string me along, and _assuming_ we survive anyway, is that what you intend to do – rejoin the New Watchers' Council?"

"I hadn't thought about it." Wesley uttered the lie with total calm.

Ending his own life in order to seek the oblivion of a grave was quietly appealing in it's promise of eternal sleep…_peace, and rest_…but regardless of what that scrap of the Niamh Scroll currently masquerading as decoration on his apartment wall might imply about the _Mahju's_ demise being self-inflicted, Wesley knew it to be moot. Quite simply he could not and never would abandon Winifred Burkle while she was still trapped within Illyria, and it was seeming ever less likely that Wesley would find a way to return the two into separate bodies.

Though of course, the Niamh Scroll ambiguously danced around the _Mahju's_ suicide with unusual cryptic phraseology not helped by the fact that the section was incomplete – what Wesley wouldn't give for a full, undamaged copy…

Involuntarily, Wesley frowned at himself for recalling such trifling semantics, wondering why he was also reminded of Gary/Gark's comments in _Ye Olde Britannia _that True Prophecy couldn't ever be circumvented, '_the father will kill the son_', even though Angel _not_ killing his son blew that idea out of the water. Whatever the weasel-faced man's employers were trying to clue him in on, Wesley had neither the time nor much inclination to follow up on it. 

Responding to Wesley's scowl though not knowing the reason for it, Angel admitted. "Sometimes…I'm too _scared_ to think about what will happen if everything does turn out all _right_."

"Why?" Wesley encouraged.

Angel explained, "Cordy once said to me, "'_You're the only guy I know who came to LA to get __**older**__!_'" The world changes profoundly in uncountable ways every single day, but…"

"_You_ remain static." Wesley concluded softly.

"Yeah. I feel like a spectator at the Grand Prix and the rest of the world are the cars flashing by in a blur of speed?" As Wesley nodded understanding, Angel continued, "That dimension back there of the recent past in Sunnydale…where Spike chained _himself_ down in Buffy's basement, refusing to remain loose while the First could still trigger him to kill…? What Spike said to Buffy when his chip began to malfunction - "'_I wasn't meant to last this long…something else we have in common._'" That's how I feel, if that makes any sense?"

"It makes perfect sense." Wesley reassured him. "Angel, you were Sired by Darla a month before your twenty-seventh birthday. When was that?"

"Wes', you know that – 1753."

"Exactly: _static_. You've been twenty-six for two and a half _centuries_. But you, more than anyone, know the truth of that saying about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe that's why Angelus never killed a Slayer – by the time he crossed paths with one, he'd lived long enough to understand that the Slayer was as cursed as he was – because before Buffy Summers decided she was going to have family, friends and a non-Slayer personal life, the Slayer did not _live_. Just like the vampire, she only _existed_. Eat; sleep; kill; over and over and over again in a Groundhog Day life that eventually would become a living hell."

Angel blinked at the harsh condemnation of the old Watchers' Council implicit in Wesley's statement. It was true. Most Slayers had been Called in their early adolescence, ages of thirteen to fifteen not being uncommon, but by the same token had been dead by eighteen to twenty. In the traditional Slayer mode of operation, those few years had actually been a lot longer emotionally than the literal time span they covered. Spike again, with his perfect clarity had pointed that out to Buffy: _"No Slayer has ever been __**defeated**__ in battle, but eventually each one __**chooses**__ to yield. There's a difference, pet."_

Ah Spike, his vain, obnoxious, irritating, insightful and perceptive grandson. Just like the pain of a broken bone or impacted toothache stretched out for an intolerable eternity that made you stare in shock at the clock which claimed only five minutes had passed, to a Slayer who did nothing but eat, sleep and fight brutal _Celebrity Deathmatch_ type battles with monsters twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, those few short years _were_ the equivalent of decades of life.

Exhausting, terrifying, hopeless, ultimately unbearably _wearisome_ life. Angel could understand the _de facto_ suicide of a Slayer because he understood those emotions. "That's why Angelus travelled so much. Always seeking new places, new victims, new tortures, new things to do, new ways to help push away the knowledge that we were stuck forever at one point in time, like a branch wedged in the side eddy of a stream, stuck forgotten while the water flows on by."

Wesley sighed wearily, "Precisely; and I have nothing comforting to say about it, Angel. Harsh as it might sound, you and me – _all _of us including the Scooby Gang – are creatures out of our place and out of time, each one of us surrounded by people that in any _normal_ life we would never have encountered."

"I guess…"

Wesley gave an uncharacteristic shrug of resignation. "Think about it. What you said about being at the battle of Waterloo in 1815? You were born in 1726, a quarter of a century _before_ the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, for heaven's sake! Even if, in the words of Psalms 90:10: 'the days of our years…because of special mightiness they are eighty years', you should _still_ have died of old age by the time of the Napoleonic Wars. That's almost forty years before _Spike_ was even born as a human baby, never mind the rest of us. I'm thirty-six now, which places me in the interesting situation of being both a decade older than you _and_ two-hundred-and-forty-two years younger."

Despite the situation, Angel couldn't help but attempt an English accent as he imitated Spike, "And wackiness ensues."

Wesley winced. "Please don't torture my mother tongue. But basically, yes."

"It's really hard, you know." Angel told the Englishman. "To _not _be able to move on when everyone around you is constantly developing. I know I've been around for two hundred and fifty years but in all the ways that count, I'm still twenty-six. Buffy's only a few years younger than me, but she's grown more as a person in the last seven years that I have managed to develop in over two centuries."

"And that upsets you?"

"It's a little hard to take, and yes, I do hear the sound of my own childish pique." Angel put in. "I look around and even though _I'm_ the one with the super-powers, I'm the one left behind...Faith the Evil Teenage Slayer is now a pregnant twenty-something! Willow Rosenberg went from timid mouse to the world's most powerful witch. Xander Harris – irritating boy loser to Champion of Light and he hasn't even _got_ any special powers. Cordelia Chase – airhead cheerleader to heroine. Wesley Wyndham-Pryce – the Duke of Dork to scary badass in five years. Remember when we were looking for Dana Parvati and Spike stormed out of my office? I followed him and tried to stop him, made some crack about how he hadn't spent any time being remorseful over the terrible things he'd done?"

"Yes?"

"He came back at me with this crack about how wallowing in the guilt was making me look _old_. At the time I was angry, but later on all I could feel was a bit of _relief_ that I had changed in some noticeable way, if only for the worse, which I know sounds really stupid even as I say it." Angel sighed.

"Not really you do look older, it has to do with the mystical nature of being a vampire." Wesley said.

"Huh?"

The ex-Watcher sighed. "Psalms 90:10 states, "'_In themselves the days of your years are seventy years, and if because of special mightiness they are eighty years, Yet their insistence on trouble and hurtful things_.'" That last is the relevant part – trouble and hurtful things. Due to their utterly evil nature, a vampire's existence comprises a constant miasma of hurtful, painful, depraved things and you can't spent every second enveloped in such evil without it leaving a mark. A human being can only seriously abuse their body with drugs, booze and promiscuity for about two years before the damage becomes irreversible – the bags under your eyes won't go away, the lines of dissipation don't disappear after a couple of nights' sleep."

"And exactly the same applies to vampires?" Angel was doubtful.

"In a mystical sense, yes. As the decades of depravity and debauchery ooze by it gets harder and takes longer and requires more effort for the demon inside to maintain the disguising illusion of humanity, like drug addicts who have to take more and more heroin or cocaine to achieve the same effect they could achieve with a lesser amount a few months before."

Angel nodded, seeing the logic in the comparison.

"Think about vampires like Kakistos, the Prince of Lies and the Master, who could _not_ move about amongst humans because they were so old they looked fully like the demons within them. That didn't happen overnight – and they weren't like that _voluntarily_. At one time they looked fully human, it took decades, centuries for them to get to the point where they _couldn't_ appear human any more even if they wanted to," Wesley illustrated. "Actually, if it weren't for the fact that the Roma cursed Angelus with a soul in 1898 and created _you_, I'd venture that right about now Angelus himself would probably be getting to the stage where he was looking more like the Master than Liam, and not through _choice_. Having a soul has slowed down that process tremendously for both you and Spike."

"I never thought of it like that." Angel admitted, adding with a hint of slightly immature malicious cheer, "Spike _does_ look a tiny bit older than when Dru' Sired him."

"He was Sired at twenty-six, the same as you were, but we tend not to notice because he acts as if he's barely _six_ most of the time." Wesley perceptively assessed Spike's tendency to 'dumb down' his intelligence with distracting histrionics. "It's hard even for me being British as it is to get my head round the fact that Spike was born in 1854; that's the year the _Crimean War_ started for goodness' sake! When my thrice-great-grandfather was fighting the Battle of Balaclava, Spike was six weeks old; in that same year when Florence Nightingale became the Lady of the Lamp, our own bleach-blond English poet was in _diapers_. Counting from his birth, altogether he's a hundred-and-fifty-years-old, which is a lot longer than most vampires tend to live. Vampires who make it to a century plus tend to be exceptions rather than the rule."

Angel digested these facts. In all the time he'd been fighting the good fight – from going to Sunnydale at Whistler's urging to help the new Slayer, Buffy Summers, right up to now in LA – he had 'known' but never really _known_ that he had forged deep personal relationships with people whose life spans and his own should never have intersected. Buffy Summers, the greatest love of his life, and Cordelia, whom he had also come to love, were both a hundred and fifty four years his junior. Wesley, Gunn, Xander, Willow, Fred…even Spike's – or rather William's - natural human lifespan wouldn't have overlapped with that of 'Liam' even if he had lived to a hundred, an unlikely achievement for an Irishman, even from Liam's well-to-do family, born at the beginning of the periodic waves of famine and violent political unrest that had rent Ireland asunder in forewarning of the Great Potato Famine of 1845. Also, that his and Spike's souls had had any salutary effects other than transforming them from merciless serial killers had never been something that Angel even considered –

Wesley stopped dead so suddenly that Angel walked full into him, a low hiss emanating from Wesley's throat. Directly ahead of them was a huge temple, an impressive colonnade of columns supporting an intricately carved balcony of bas-relief carvings…portraying images you would _never_ see on the Basilica of St Peter, or St Mark's or indeed any place of honourable worship. Angel narrowed his eyes, aware of a falsity, looking closer at the structure and seeing by virtue of his more searching look that the temple was largely illusion. There _was_ a large, rectangular construct of wood – flat roof and stout pillars at each corner – that had been embellished with the appearance of grand porphyry columns and polished marble steps, like a photograph where a 'ghost image' has been superimposed over the original subject.

The dark vampire absorbed this self-consciously grandiose display in a second by sheer automatic reflex, for his focus was solely on the group of beings in, and no other description would be as accurate, shit-brown robes gathered around a blazing brazier.

Continued in Chapter 9

_© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers_


	9. Chapter 9

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 9**

The Oligarchs. They had to be, for while there might be many groups in many dimensions gathered around ceremonial fires in front of temples, it was highly unlikely that more than one of these would be chanting in a very unpleasant sounding language at the holographic-like image of Buffy Summers' face that flickered in the air above the flames. At least two of the Oligarchs were demons, or at least creatures from other dimensions where the dominant sapient species wasn't humanity. However, the Oligarch directly ahead of them was a familiar one. As one, both Wesley and Angel launched themselves directly from off the Ghost Road at the group.

Some preternatural instinct for saving his own skin kicking in, Rutherford Sirk suddenly turned his head sharply, his perpetual expression of supercilious superiority briefly wiped away by shock and fear as he saw the enraged twosome literally almost flying through the air towards him. Survival instinct cutting in, Sirk did nothing fancy, but rather simply dropped to the grass and rolled his body frantically away, his ugly robes tangling around him. Unable to change direction, Wesley and Angel collided with the coppery skinned humanoid – suspiciously resembling the deposed human-hating priests of Pylea – who had been on Sirk's left, sending him flying. The brazier, its hot coals and the rest of the Oligarchs were tossed aside in a tangled melée of flailing limbs and howls of shock.

An entirely inadvertently well-placed lashing elbow caught Wesley in the head and sent him reeling, while Angel tried to hang on grimly to the thrashing creature he had automatically grabbed at, even as out of the corner of his eye he saw Rutherford Sirk hitch up his robes to reveal truly ugly pasty-white skinny legs before the ex-Wolfram & Hart traitor took off like a nervous horse in the Kentucky Derby.

With cries that sounded more like squeals of fear, the Oligarchs scattered and ran, Wesley and Angel uttering curses as the fleeing figures began to teleport to other dimensions. Wesley took off after the fleeing Sirk while Angel tried to block the frantic pummelling he was getting off his Oligarch, who had managed to virtually wriggle out of the robe in his attempts to escape. With no other weaponry to hand, Angel utilised his best advantage – his fangs erupted from his upper and lower gums and he bit down, hard.

_Eeeyck!_ It was hard to say who made the noise, Angel or his victim. The Oligarch wasn't human…and tasted like raw meat left out in the sun for a week. Rancid didn't even cover it!

"Agh! Ack! Yeck! Plght!" Frantically Angel spat out the bit of flesh even as the Oligarch scrambled away and teleported somewhere else in blind panic. Still spitting and hacking, Angel spared not a glance but hared off after Wesley, who was charging towards the fleeing Sirk with all the focus of an enraged bull towards the matador.

Looking behind him, his face red, puffy and sweating, Sirk's eyes widened. Skidding to a halt he glanced at Angel and took on an expression of desperate cunning before he pointed an arm at them and cried out words in a harsh language the vampire didn't recognise. It took Angel only a moment to realise that nothing had happened before Wesley crashed full into Sirk and bore him to the ground.

Wiping his mouth, Angel stopped and paused for a moment to admire Wesley's technique as the Englishman smoothly smashed his fist piston-like into Sirk's face repeatedly. Unfortunately they needed the man alive and able to talk.

"Don't break his jaw," Angel advised.

As the vampire hoped, this was sufficient to snap Wesley back into the mission. Standing back up and hauling the battered Sirk with him, Wesley purred, "Well, well, what a surprise, Rutherford Sirk. I knew your ego was fragile, but this…Your little attempt to kill the Slayers is a display of petulance I thought even you were above."

The ex-Watcher staggered back, gasping, hatred twisting his features as his face settled back into its usual sneer. "Petulance? God, you're as stupid as your father, so small in your worldview. All he aspired to was to rule the Watchers Council. This is about power, the only thing that matters, you twit. I intend to have the power, and I've got no intention of having a bunch of interfering Slayer sluts poking their noses in at every turn."

Angel's retracting fangs erupted again, causing a satisfactory terror to flash across Sirk's face. "Not seeing your awesomeness, Sirk. Now where did your cohorts go?"

"Cohorts?" Sirk drew himself up. "You think I need _them_? Your pathetic gaggle of giggling idiot Slayers are as good as dead, and I think I'm going to kill both of you too."

"Oh spare us the Moriarty riff." Wesley snapped. "You've been doing the Evil Mastermind bit ever since you ran away from the Watchers like a mongrel with your tail between your legs and you've never pulled it off even with the resources of Wolfram & Hart at your disposal. You're not even a has-been, more a never-was."

Ignoring Sirk's darkening face, Wesley mockingly told Angel, "Poor Rutherford. What a blow to your ego it must have been? Rutherford's bloated self-opinion genuinely convinced him that he _was_ the Watchers. He really believed that he was so important that stealing the Codex and fleeing the Watchers to Wolfram & Hart would cause a hole so great it would swallow the Council whole."

His face twisting into a sneer unpleasantly reminiscent of Sirk's own, Wesley jeered, "I think the scandal lasted all of a week, within a month it was if you'd never been there. Poor Sirk, all high and mighty about his integral, essential role in the Watchers Council and he turns out to be like tits on a bull. Now it's my turn for the ultimatum: help us clear up your latest pile of shit and I might be charitable enough to only maim you instead of kill you. Your little game has wasted enough of my time."

"I'm not finished playing yet!" Sirk snarled dramatically, jumping back away from them. "_Ignarayak!_"

Both Wesley and Angel waited a second, before the ex-Watcher raised an eyebrow as Sirk swore viciously. "I think those cohorts were more essential than you thought."

Angel uttered an inarticulate cry, causing Wesley to jerk his head around sharply as the dark vampire doubled over. Sirk hissed triumphantly, backing away, his eyes fixed on Angel as the vampire clutched his stomach, gloating angrily, "Now you'll understand my power, Pryce! All I did was abandon those penny-ante amateurs of the Watcher Council, yours was the true perversion of serving a vampire, so let your slaughter be at his hands!"

Wesley ignored Sirk's continued imprecations. While not a rank beginner, Sirk's ego _did_ far outstrip his actual abilities. For all his self-delusions, Sirk was a candle next to a star compared to Willow Rosenberg, or even the late Tara Maclay. He had nowhere near the power or the skill to remove Angel's soul, and as long as Angelus remained trapped by it, Wesley knew himself to be safe from death at Angel's hands, though admittedly not injury.

While Angel's attempt to smother Wesley in hospital had been a wild outpouring of rage, true, it had _not_ been a serious attempt to _really_ kill Wesley. Angel and Angelus were the same in that their rage was cold and laser-focused, not wild and flailing. If Angel had truly intended to kill Wesley as punishment for kidnapping Connor, the dark vampire would coolly have waited until the dead of night and slipped unseen into the ex-Watcher's hospital room. Like they both had witnessed Giles – or rather, Ripper – do to Glory's human host Ben during the Ghost Roads replays, Angel would coldly have used his vampire strength to suffocate Wesley merely by holding his hand over Wesley's mouth and pinching his nostrils shut, the strength of one undead hand enough to withstand Wesley's death-struggles before he left unseen and leaving behind no evidence that Wesley's death was anything other than an unfortunate complication from his massive blood-loss after having his throat cut.

"Angel?" Wesley demanded.

"An invisible mule just kicked me in the stomach!" Angel slowly straightened, glaring at Sirk. "That hurt, and now I'm really _pissed_."

Clearly this was not the reaction Sirk was expecting to result from whatever he'd done, since the man gaped at him in shock. Angel channelled a bit of Angelus, who was also not happy at the pain and also fed up of Sirk's egomaniac posturing, into his smile and eyes as he took a step towards Sirk, satisfied as the man blanched. Wesley drew in a breath to ask a question –

Angel gasped again, literally swaying with desire, the need so strong it made him dizzy. Both their heartbeats were as loud as steel-drums in his ears, the wonderful _whoosh-whoosh_ of hot, rich, sweet/salt blood surging through their veins like a waterfall over rain swollen rapids, the heady fragrance wafting off their warm, tender flesh like a garden of honeysuckle and tea-roses…_no…_only off one body…earthy, sandalwood with a subtle scent of lemon. The other was sour and harshly vinegary, as if Sirk had marinated in his own superciliousness so long that he had contaminated his own flesh with his spite. Saliva flooded Angel's mouth so that he was practically drooling and his stomach twisted in anguished need.

"Angel!" Wesley exclaimed as the vampire doubled over again. "What did you do to him?" He threw over his shoulder as he went to aid Angel.

"_Get back!_"

Wesley obeyed instantly; he was sensible enough to heed Angel's desperation. "What is it?"

"I'm hungry." Angel closed his eyes, struggling for control, aware of Sirk's gloating laugh.

"That's it?" Wesley blinked.

"No, you don't understand. Wesley, I'm _starving_."

"Angel, you fed before we left…"

"Fool!" Sirk cackled, suddenly standing several feet away. "How wonderful that I can use Angel's own nature to get him to rip your throat out!" Cackling again, the ex-Watcher sneered at Wesley's confused expression, "Your pet vampire spent three months at the bottom of the ocean in a state of starvation. My spell has recreated that period of starvation…and _amplified it ten-fold_. Angel's body thinks it hasn't fed for months! How fast can you run, Wesley, old boy?"

"Get back to the Ghost Road, Wes', now." Angel clenched his fists and gritted his teeth as he rode out the desperate need. His body shuddered, wracked with the frantic hunger he'd experienced trapped at the bottom of the ocean until Wesley had…Wesley…Wesley…food. He took a step forward before he could stop himself. "Hurry!"

Wesley looked at Angel, then at Sirk, now too far to grab and pulverise. Leaping at Sirk and killing him was not an option – the instant Wesley moved at any kind of speed, Angel's hair's-breadth of control would snap and the instinct to chase and bring down something that ran from him would kick in – just as Wesley was nowhere near strong enough to beat Angel in a fight, he wasn't fast enough to outrun him. Instead of doing the sensible thing and teleporting himself to the nearest safe dimension, Sirk continued to loiter with intent.

Wesley wasn't an idiot and Sirk's plan was far less Machiavellian complex than he imagined. Even if Angel managed to hang on while Wesley inched himself to the protection of the Ghost Road, the desperate need clawing at Angel had clearly shot his co-ordination and reflexes to pieces. With Wesley on the Ghost Road, Angel would be defenceless, and it would be the work of but a moment for Sirk to dust him with one of the many far too convenient bits of branches laying about this meadow. But Wesley still had one card to play. "Then feed."

"I can't!" Angel cried desperately. "I can't – I wouldn't be able to stop."

"Of course you would. Do you remember when we rescued Fred from Pylea?" Wesley demanded. "The demon broke through then, remember? You were afraid you wouldn't be able to push it back, but you did. This is no different. You _know_ in your mind that what you're feeling is mystically imposed. It's artificial. It's fake. You're not really starving, so you'll be able to pull back."

Angel looked at him with desperate hope, Sirk with gleeful arrogance. Time to get rid of the bad guy. Turning slowly to face Sirk, Wesley liberated his ever-present handgun from the back of his waistband, savouring the stunned expression on Sirk's face.

"I'm quite sure that you have wards to prevent Angel biting you. I'm equally sure, however, that needing to protect yourself from _bullets_ was _not_ something you factored into your little magnum opus, and I have no intention of feeding Angel and trying to keep an eye on you sneaking up to brain me while I do it, so…" He pulled the trigger, the loud report making the avian species of this dimension take wing in screeching clouds of alarm.

Sirk spun and fell, his face contorted in shock. Wesley shoved the pistol in his pocket, his attitude calm. He had no time for some complicated and time-consuming method of immobilising Sirk to keep him alive, nor any notion of bothering with one; Angel's welfare was his only concern.

"Can you walk?" He asked as he was suddenly struck by an idea.

"Yeah." Angel nodded jerkily.

"Let's try and make it back to the Ghost Road." Wesley suggested. "I think Sirk's spell will be broken once we get back on it." _I hope_.

Angel nodded, riding out the waves of pain, the savage need to feed battering at him as he walked jerkily back towards the silvery thread he fixed his eyes on, by sheer willpower shutting out the sound of the close by heart beat, the soft rasp of working lungs and the sound of the blood being pumped around his friend's body. What was it Spike had said about reciting poetry when he had suffered migraine as a human…Angel didn't know any poetry…hockey scores? He knew hockey scores. Let's see…

Wesley kept a good six feet between himself and Angel, dropping back slightly so Angel was less able to smell him. Despite the urgency, he dare not rush, for that would make his heart rate, circulation and respiration all louder and therefore all the more enticing to Angel's senses. Fifty feet to forty, then thirty, then fifteen, then ten, then eight…

"Damn!"

Angel jerked his eyes away from the silvery Holy Grail of the Ghost Road as Wesley cursed. "What?"

"Sirk's gone, I thought I got him."

The vampire looked over to the rolling hillside to where Sirk had fallen, but there was nothing there. "Maybe he made it to the tree line or teleported?"

"Prob- _Duck_!"

Angel instinctively ducked his head as a large spear-like branch shot through the empty air where his skull had been a second ago. Clutching one hand to his shoulder, Rutherford Sirk abandoned subtlety and pretensions of superiority as he vengefully just conjured small fireballs and hurled them at the duo. Both dodged the missiles but there was no cover, so Wesley picked up a small knot of wood himself and hurled it like a fast bowler straight at Sirk. The evil man swore, ducked and then incredibly ran straight at Wesley and Angel, who braced for attack, but fifteen feet in front of them, Sirk disappeared into thin air, obviously having created a dimensional rift he could get through. Angel staggered with the after effects of the adrenaline surge and heard the rapid beating of –

His prey didn't struggle and Angel bit deep, almost crying out as the hot, adrenaline-saturated blood filled his mouth. He gulped eagerly, feeling his starving tissues expanding, shrivelled cells swelling finally after so many months without food, the pain of not having fed for a couple of hours – _what?_

Angel slowed his feeding instead of increasing it, trying to shake of the fog that clouded his mind. His prey was making sounds, his soul protesting the feeding off a human. _What? _He raised his head slightly, suddenly aware that his food, in the face of all sanity, was rubbing his back in concentric circles even as he whispered in Angel's ear. "It's okay, you can do this. It's all right."

Wesley? Angel stopped feeding altogether, despite his starving body only slightly assuaged by the small amount of blood he'd taken, and lifted his head from Wesley's neck, looking around. Wesley…Ghost Roads, yes, that was it…Sirk…the spell…Jumping back as if Wesley was red-hot, Angel felt suddenly sick and his stomach actually roiled as it would bring back the blood he'd just taken. "_Wes'_."

"Get a grip, Angel!" snapped Wesley in a savage manner reminiscent of those terrible first few weeks after Fred's death, before she was able to re-emerge, when the Englishman's whisky-fuelled anger and grief had led him into wild mood-swings and unstable outbursts, which made Angel now stiffen in instinctive hostility.

However, the Englishman was glancing around them edgily. "I think we should get back on the Ghost Roads as fast as possible. You can go all brooding and self-flagellating later."

In the distance, there came a faint _whomp_ sound that made the grass blades shiver slightly, as if something the size of a super-tanker was approaching. Sirk's spell apparently having been broken when Angel actually bit Wesley, Angel's cravings disappeared as suddenly as they'd struck him as he and Wesley raced flat out the mercifully short distance and hurled themselves onto the Ghost Road. Resisting the urge to imitate the pope and kiss the Ghost Road, Angel stood upright, trying to get a look at Wesley's neck. No blood trickled from the puncture wounds, which weren't as deep as Angel had feared.

As if he had been giving Angel a moment to inspect the wound, Wesley turned back to face the direction they had come from, pausing as a shadow blotted out the meadow that they could see underneath the translucent Ghost Road. Both craned their necks as they instinctively looked up; a reptilian creature that looked like a T-Rex on steroids with teeth the size of telegraph poles snapped it's jaws futilely at them, it's maw passing through them as if they and the Ghost Road were simply mirages.

At a pace almost approaching a jog, Angel and Wesley left the horror behind as they made their way back along the Ghost Roads. They ignored all the dimensions that loomed either side, and as if knowing their attention could not be snared, the Ghost Roads showed only strange and bizarre dimensions, landscapes inhabited by creatures too alien to describe, worlds shrouded in atmospheres probably lethal to vampires as well as humans. Finally Angel saw it – the portal they had entered by was hovering slightly above the Ghost Road they were currently on as if it had never disappeared from sight in the first place, while the Ghost Road carried on below it.

Like looking at a TV set where something was wrong with the colour circuits, Angel could see Buffy and some of the others waiting patiently in the Hyperion lobby, the Slayer's non-reacting face showing that while they could see her, she could not see them. Stepping into the portal, Wesley and Angel were enveloped in the milk-white mist, but unlike the previous duration of several minutes, this lasted only a second and they were almost tumbling out of the portal into the protective circle.

Continued in Chapter 10

_© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers_


	10. Chapter 10

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 10**

"Angel? You've only been gone for a half hour! What –" Buffy broke off, her eyes widening as she took in the puncture wounds on Wesley's neck.

There were only two vampires in the world that would _bite_ Wesley but _not _kill him, and Spike was with her, so…

"We found the Oligarchs." Angel answered her harshly, acutely aware of the clearly visible bite marks on Wesley's neck and recalling her harsh treatment of Spike as he looked at his grandson.

Her eyes flicking to follow his look towards the blond vampire, Angel saw understanding, guilt and regret shadow the Slayer's eyes. "I see…" Buffy said softly, sorrowfully.

"Rutherford Sirk is the leader of the Oligarchs." Wesley announced clearly, breaking the uncomfortable moment of understanding that made none of the Scooby Gang meet Angel's eyes as he shot a pointed look at Spike and then them. Stepping out of the protective circle, his face grim, Wesley went on, "He has several human accomplices and several demon ones – I counted about twenty of them in total…Angel?"

"Twenty-two." Angel confirmed, picking up on Wesley's cue and simply ignoring the fact that the bite marks were visible.

"Lorne, a couple of the demonic types looked suspiciously like our nasty priests from Pylea. Would you and Gru' be willing to investigate?" Wesley requested.

"No problem, muffin." Lorne and Gru both nodded as the anagogic demon answered for them both. "We'll get the skinny."

"Rutherford Sirk? Good lord, I had no idea he was still alive, even." Giles was vigorously polishing his spectacles, a clear sign of perturbation.

"What's the skinny on this Sirk guy?" Faith asked. "You and Wes' know him?"

"He _was_ a Watcher." Giles explained. "In fact, regardless of the Old Guard's opinion regarding myself and Wesley, Sirk is the only real traitor the Watchers have ever suffered within our ranks, not counting Gwendolyn Post who was mentally unstable anyway, which is actually rather amazing considering how many millennia we have existed and the temptations and opportunities for power inherent in what we do…"

Replacing his spectacles decisively, Giles elaborated, "I went to school in the same year with Sirk, and then to the Watcher's Academy, he was always a pompous windbag even as a child…and don't think I didn't see that." Giles added as Willow and Buffy exchanged '_No kidding?'_ glances.

"So what'd he do?" Faith demanded.

"He stole a priceless Codex from the archives and traded it to Wolfram & Hart for a corner office and lavish stock portfolio." Wesley responded.

"Seriously?" Andrew Wells blurted.

"In spades, mate." Spike and Angel exchanged grim looks, remembering the fake 'Cup of Perpetual Torment' quest that Sirk had sent them on in an attempt to get one to destroy the other; they'd both like to have a little _tête-à-tête _with Mr Rutherford Sirk.

Giles explained, "Rutherford's father was August Sirk, one of the finest mystical linguists the Watchers has ever produced. His mother Clara was my mother's cousin. They were both excellent Watchers but they ruined Rutherford. He was an only child, born in their late middle-age when they thought they would never have a family and they spoiled him rotten, literally. Admittedly Rutherford was nearly as gifted a mystical linguist as his father, but even so, his talent never quite matched up to his ego."

"You can say that again." Spike snorted. Addressing the room at large, the bleach-blond vampire commented, "'Conceited git' doesn't even begin to cover it. You should have seen him when he sent me and Angel after this fake Cup a while back – you'd have thought he was a god deigning to speak to ants the way he carried on."

"Payback," Giles shrugged slightly. "Sirk never achieved the heady heights of power he craved because he thought Wolfram & Hart would hand them to him on a plate. Having Angel arrive as his new boss would have given him ulcers, and I'm amazed he didn't have a stroke at being subordinate to Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, the Watchers' wunderkind linguist who was snapping at his heels when he jumped ship. That Wesley is a twice the linguist Rutherford is with half the effort ate him alive even when he was still in the Watchers."

Wesley blinked and went pink. "Oh, well…"

"So Rutherford Sirk went all Darth Vader." Buffy shook her head. "Giles, why don't you ever _share_ these anecdotes in time for it do some _good_?"

"I second that." Angel ignored Wesley's glare.

"I haven't thought about Rutherford Sirk in years!" protested Giles. "Besides, I was already based in Sunnydale as a research Watcher on the Hellmouth when he did his little Raffles riff. I was well out of the loop." Giles pointed out. "Although, looking back, the rot set in long before that when Sirk was passed over for the opportunity to be Cho Shen Sun's Watcher – the Slayer before India Cohen, the Slayer before Buffy."

Giles went on, "As far as Rutherford was concerned he _was_ the Watchers and his ego never got over the shock of being usurped by a younger Watcher who was a woman to boot. It didn't help his ego that Sun and her Watcher Kitty Ping were one of the most successful pairings the Watchers have ever produced – Sun was Called at nineteen and lived to twenty-eight. It probably would have been even longer, but she…died…two days after Kitty Ping was killed in a car crash in Tokyo."

Nobody needed to say anything, recognising Giles' euphemism for the Slayer's _de facto_ suicide. Several people including Buffy and Robin Wood darted glances at Spike, the blond vampire's adage that a Slayer was never defeated but chose to yield by now having become a well-known maxim amongst the Slayers.

"Basically, Sirk has the usual Big Bad To Do List – Rule The World, Absolute Power, blah, blah," Wesley put in, "and has rightly realised that a world full of Slayers will put a serious crimp in this plan, hence the Oligarchs attempts to remove the Slayers' powers."

"So what do we do now?" asked Gunn.

"Go to bed, all of you." Angel suddenly declared with unusual brusqueness, making several people start at his tone. "We're all tired and need some rest. We'll have a council of war at Wolfram & Hart tomorrow. The Oligarchs will be too busy running to make another attempt at anything tonight, and the mystical safeguards around the office should make it impossible for them to mystically 'remote dial-in' into Wolfram & Hart and get at a Slayer. I'll take watch for tonight."

With acquiescing murmurs, people began to drift off, a variety of low-voiced conversations over the most recent development floating around the lobby. Wesley gave him a long look before walking upstairs and Buffy hesitated, but Angel returned her look with a hard-eyed stare, not yet ready to relent. He wanted to have at least the semblance of being alone for a while, without any distractions and away from the penetrating gaze of Solange, whose presence had brought back many unpleasant recollections, the murder of Jenny Calendar prominent amongst them.

Continued in Chapter 11

_© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers_


	11. Chapter 11

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 11**

The elevators rumbled, floorboards creaked, doors clicked open and shut, pipes creaked and water splashed, mattresses squeaked and clothing rustled before it all quieted down. Angel listened to it all absently; his hands shoved into his pants pockets, gazing through the double glass doors into the courtyard garden of the hotel, noting how the flowers and shrubbery were in danger of overwhelming the tiled fountain and wrought-iron gates.

What was the current psycho-babble phrase? Ah yes, processing. He needed to process what he'd seen on the Ghost Roads.

After a certain length of time, humans tended to romanticize the past, recalling with fond nostalgia bygone days but forgetting the downside; it appeared vampires had the same tendency. Since he'd left Sunnydale for LA, Angel realised that he'd gradually begun to view his past relationship with Buffy more and more idealistically, forgetting that despite her many good qualities, Buffy could be self-righteous, judgemental, intolerant and above all wilfully blind, seeing only what she wished to see. Angel winced as he acknowledged his own similar flaws – it had been so easy and much more comfortable to blame Spike as the one-size-fits-all 'problem' affecting any stressful situation than look deeper into what was really going on…

"She couldn't blame the witch." Spike commented conversationally as if reading Angel's mind, strolling into the lobby from the bar with the nonchalance of someone who is just idling away time.

Angel knew better and he tilted his head slightly as he watched his grandson mooch, aware that Spike wouldn't leave until he'd made his point.

"Little Red and her friends really _did_ think that they were saving Buffy from a hell dimension." Spike said, coming to stand beside his grandsire to look out into the garden, neither of their reflections showing in the panes of glass in the doors. "Funny really, if they _had, _instead of tearing her out of heaven, Buffy would have been all over them with hugs and kisses and flowers. Buffy couldn't hate Willow for doing something she genuinely believed was helping her best friend, or the others for going along with it, and she didn't want to upset them by telling them the truth, so she just locked it all away, buried it inside and hoped if she ignored it long enough, it would just go away."

"I know. We saw Sweet's spell on Sunnydale." Angel answered, and softly sang: ""'_You can't tell the ones you love, you know they couldn't deal, but whisper in a dead man's ear doesn't make it real_…'""

"They _couldn't_ deal...like you can't sing." Spike shrugged, yet without any seeming rancour. "Xander Harris, Willow Rosenberg and Rupert Giles have many foibles, but stupidity _isn't_ one of them. _They_ knew – maybe not Anya, or Tara or Dawn – but those three, trust me, they'd been around their Slayer long enough to have figured it out by the end of her first day back where she'd _really_ been…where they'd _really_ taken her away from…They knew deep down where Buffy had been long before Sweet's musical mojo forced the facts out of us all in rocking rhymes, but they couldn't, wouldn't admit even to themselves what they had done, so they said and did nothing and left Buffy in the care of a demon, because then they could take comfort in being able to lay all the blame on m- that demon when things went bad."

"That doesn't make it right!" Angel snapped, irrationally irked by Spike's laconic acceptance. "The way she treated you, the way _they_ treated you. Giles conspired with Robin Wood to murder you behind Buffy's back. When you'd fought side by side with them for nearly two years and saved their lives, literally, on more than one occasion, and they repay that by trying to murder you. It doesn't bother you that they would do that to you when you had a _soul_? That they would do something that bad?"

"Bad in comparison to what?" Spike challenged. "Let's just remember who's the injured party here, big guy. So Spikey got hisself a soul and is racing along the Road to Redemption. Big bloody deal. Still doesn't alter the fact that I _murdered_ Robin Wood's mother, which I think gives _him_ the props in the "Who's got the most right to be pissed off?" stakes. Of course it wasn't _right_, but it was _understandable_."

"I don't understand it." Retorted Angel.

"Of course you do, love," contradicted Spike with open amusement, "because you've done it just as much as they have. That's what Guilt is. Whenever someone feels guilty about something his or her natural tendency is to rationalise away what they've done, to shift the blame onto someone or something else, because very few people have the balls and the personal integrity to accept responsibility for their own actions until they're _forced_ to do so – we call those that can do that 'saints'. _You_ had to _force_ Faith to accept what she'd done when she murdered the Deputy Mayor, _Buffy_ had to _force_ Andrew Wells to accept that he'd murdered his best friend, Jonathan Levinson."

"I suppose…"

"Suppose nothing, it's not pretty but it's a fact. It was _easier_ for Giles to blame me than face his own culpability. As long as he could pretend that _I _was the problem and _I_ was the threat, he could ignore what _he'd _done to contribute to the whole sorry mess in the first place."

Spike lit a cigarette and it's reflection bobbed in the glass panes of the doors, seemingly floating in mid-air in a way that was probably comical, had Angel been in any mood to find humour, as Spike expounded, "Giles _abandoned _her, Angel. Back when Willow was heading for the Dark Side and did that wacky Tabula Rasa spell, Giles had already got a plane ticket to England - and for what 'not-good' reason? _Indoctrination_."

"I don't understand?" Angel blinked. "Are you saying something brainwashed Giles into leaving Sunnydale?"

"Yes. He did. His entire culture did." Spike snorted. "Look, do you think it's a coincidence that Giles and Wesley and every British Watcher you've ever met has that stuffy, more-emotionally-repressed-than-Vulcans vibe? Giles was emotionally abandoned by his family before he was out of leading reins, shipped off to boarding schools to grow up in dormitories and maybe glimpse mother and father as beautifully dressed strangers every few months or so; that saying about the war being won on the playing fields of Eton? It was true because English children have to be enormously self-reliant from toddlerhood; it helped our race conquer the world and create an Empire upon which the sun never set, but it didn't do much for our mental health. Did you dad ever send you away?" Spike asked suddenly.

"No." Angel shook his head. As acrimonious as their relationship had been for a long time, the idea of banishing his son to some distant city out of the way would never have occurred to Liam's father.

"In a strange way, I was _lucky_ my father died before I was born." Spike admitted. "I'm sure my dad would have loved me in his own way, but as a noble son of an ancient English House, I would have been packed off to Eton or Harrow or Winchester by the time I was old enough for first grade. Instead, I grew up with my mum, and I knew I was loved. But Giles…there's a difference between _dependency_ and _reliance_. Everyone has an instinctive need to be _needed_, but Giles upbringing, and Wesley's, made that fact anathema. Rupert Giles was brought up to see that view of human relationships as heresy...why do you think he's a single, middle-aged librarian with all the romantic debonair style of the Marx Brothers?"

"Neither of them are very comfortable with feelings." Angel admitted, smiling faintly despite his inner turmoil. "When Faith left LA – after Willow restored my soul – you should have seen Wesley squirm when he thought she was going to hug him – there are mountain ranges with less rigidity."

"'Never complain, never explain.'" quoted Spike. "Giles was so locked in to seeing any form of emotional _reliance _as an unhealthy _dependency_ that _his _solution to Buffy's loss of her _mother _was to put an _ocean _between them! He was going to go back to England and leave a twenty-year-old child to bring up a fifteen-year-old child because: she needed to stand on her own two feet. She was the Slayer, she had to get on with it…" Spike lowered his voice to a credible _bass-profundo_ as he trotted out these phrases in a sarcastic recitation before reverting to his normal lighter tenor voice, "…and after Buffy died saving Dawn from Glory he abandoned _all of them_. Yeah, he was grieving and devastated, but so were Xander and Willow and Dawn and the entire Scooby Gang. That group of children practically adopted him and turned him from a bumbling, inept twit into a useful Scooby, but he just walked away…he left a group of children _on the Hellmouth_ with a psychologically traumatised Slayer as the _piece de resistance_ of their so-called arsenal and _me_ as their protector! He screwed up big-time and everything went to hell – Willow addicted to magic, Xander sabotages his own future, Anya reverts to vengeance demon, Dawn's a kleptomaniac and the only one that Buffy can rely on absolutely through the whole mess is yours truly, a soulless _demon_. Given a choice between admitting all that to himself and trying to murder me, is it any surprise which one Giles picked?"

"Not really." Angel ran a hand through his hair. "Robin Wood though…I don't think I would have had your magnanimity…for all his justification."

Spike blew out a series of smoke rings that, again, seemed to appear suddenly out of thin air in the reflection of the glass and dissolve upwards. "I understood where he was coming from…if it had been my mum…but he was the same as Giles - blaming me meant he didn't have to face the truth…"

"That Nikki Wood was a Slayer before she was a mother." Angel acknowledged.

"That's my bright boy." Spike uttered Darla's oft-used phrase to her son and lover, smirking as the dark vampire flinched slightly. "I had no idea my "a Slayer with family and friends weren't in the brochure" was going to become some sort of tagline, but after me and Wood had our little heated debate in his garage I got to thinking…have you ever thought that the reason the Slayer didn't have family and friends was as much for _their sake_ as not to distract the Slayer?"

Angel stared out into the garden, confessing softly, "What you said to Wood, about how no matter how many people they've got around them, the Slayer fights alone and the rest of us be damned? I sometimes felt that with Buffy. Cordelia…we barely got to kiss…but still she _let me in…_in a way that Buffy never would. I _know_ Buffy loved me…but she still shoved a sword through my gut and sent me to a hell dimension for a century -"

"- Because she was the _Slayer_." Spike commented after a pause. "I know it. So does Buffy… one night before we went after the First she finally admitted to me how she kept her distance from everybody– she'd had a big row with Faith and the Potentials and they'd voted in Faith as their new leader –"

"I know. Me and Wesley saw, on the Ghost Roads." Angel admitted. "You went and found her so she wasn't alone…"

Spike took a deep drag of his cigarette, staring out into the night. "That's the truth that Robin Wood spent his whole life denying. Thing is, friendship is a two-way street. If you have a hero complex then you'll soon _not_ have friends. If your best friend never needs your comfort, advice, help or support, first you get bored, then you feel worthless, then you feel superfluous then you look around for someone who needs you because you're sick of always being Jimmy Olsen to Superman."

Angel found himself nodding automatically, recognising his own greatest flaw – he'd been so determined to protect 'his team' he'd stubbornly pushed them away, ignoring his own inner disquiet and Lorne's sage, succinct advice that he was an idiot. And look where it had got him and all of them – Wesley, gut-shot and Darla spearing a sword through his guts in a strange synchronicity to his friend's injury. All because he'd persistently heard 'you're a champion of light' as 'hello, Superman, what kept you?'

"Buffy and Willow are best friends, but that's why when Tara was murdered and Willow went all Emperor Palpatine on us, _Buffy couldn't reach her_, because Buffy was first and foremost The Slayer. You _know_ how I…feel…about Buffy, but no matter how close you get, how deep the bond…"

"There's always a distance you can never span, a barrier you can never breach," Angel acknowledged with, even now, a soupcon of bitterness in his tone, aware that there had always been a tiny part of Buffy that he could never touch.

"Yep, a little bit that will always be unreachable and impenetrable – the bit that is simply _Slayer_. It was why _Xander_ could save Willow from destroying herself with grief and rage – and save the world from being destroyed by her – and _Buffy_ couldn't. Xander has no super-powers, except his pure, uncontaminated humanity."

"And sometimes that's the most powerful thing of all." Angel acknowledged – after all wasn't the whole point of _this _so he could, once more, _Shanshu_ in LA – be a _human man _again.

"And Nikki Wood had exactly that same little part of her. Robin Wood hated me because it was easier to blame me than face the fact that she was his world, but _he_ wasn't hers." Finishing the cigarette, Spike expertly flicked it into the huge ceramic tub of a large potted tree, ignoring Angel's grimace. "He was right – _he_ hadn't signed up the Slayer gig, but Nikki had."

"She was the Slayer, you were a vampire. What you did…" Angel began.

"Was what has always been done; Slayer and vampire are opposite sides of the same coin." Spike spoke with flat indifference, though the shadows in his eyes belied his tone of voice. "Giles hated me because he could transfer his guilt over abandoning what are, let's be honest, his children, rather than face up to it. Robin Wood hated me because he couldn't blame his mum for putting being the Slayer above being his mother. He could avoid having to admit that his mother loved him…but not enough to renounce being the Slayer. He was barely four years old for God's sake and she was all he had. Nikki Wood _knew_ how unlikely it was she would live to see him reach fourth grade, but it didn't matter _enough_ to her to put Robin's needs first. She loved him, but not enough to _quit_; she loved him, but not enough to walk away."

"So you let him live?"

Spike shrugged. "After we'd beaten the crap out of each other and he was sitting there I really _was_ going to drain him dry, but he freed me – when I Sired my mum – the demon said terrible things, tore me apart inside and when it tried to have sex with me…but Robin made me realise that it really was _it_ and not _her._ My mum was _gone_ the instant I sank my fangs into her neck. It was the demon, not my mum, because my mum _did _love me with all her heart. I was _her_ world. I didn't kill him because I looked at the poor bugger and realised that my mum loved me so much _she_ would have quit, she _would_ have walked away from being the Slayer - for _me_."

"And because of that you gave Giles a break too by not going after him?" Angel theorised.

Spike shrugged again. "I didn't go after Giles because I didn't _need_ to. His and Wood's little master plan meant he'd already done himself more damage with _Buffy_ than I could ever inflict. He'd betrayed her trust even more with his and Wood's harebrained notion than with that Cruciamentum crap Slayers used to have to go through – and considering we were facing up to the First Evil at the time, what they'd done could very well have gotten Buffy killed…and Giles had to live with that worry every time Buffy went out the front door, every single day until we had our little Apocalypse shindig."

Angel looked at Spike, somehow not surprised by what his grandson had just said; Spike looked truth in the face, unflinching, even in relation to his own actions. "I was so locked into seeing Buffy as the beleaguered heroine…" Angel confessed, "What I saw on the Ghost Roads…Buffy being the perpetrator rather than victim of domestic violence was one brickbat I was totally unprepared for."

"That's what makes the Ghost Roads so dangerous." Spike told him. "Your body can't bleed or even be bruised, but your mind can be totally destroyed. The Ghost Roads show you what your heart _most_ desires – and what you _dread_ above all other things. They show distilled truth, raw and unpolished, and there aren't a lot of creatures of any kind who can handle _that_ without going crazy."

Momentarily Angel wondered what Spike had experienced on the Ghost Roads, but knew with complete certainty the blond vampire would never talk about it.

"Buffy is…as much as I…_care_ for her, I don't know if I could forgive what she did, if it had been me." Angel confessed flatly, hating the fact that he sounded as though he were confessing that his love for Buffy wasn't deep enough, making his final words more harsh than he intended, "What she did to you – what _they_ all did - was completely out of line."

Spike rolled his eyes heavenward. "Haven't you been listening, here? All right so what she did to me wasn't exactly Buffy's finest hour, nor was what Giles and Robin tried to do very nice either, or the way the others treated me. Big deal. So I fought side-by-side with them _before_ I got a soul. So what? Like Xander once said_, "'But I never forgot what he was.'"_ "

Angel opened his mouth, to make what objection or point he wasn't even sure, but Spike simply steamrollered on.

"Just because I only spent two weeks moaning in the basement instead of wallowing in self-loathing for a century doesn't mean I don't know _exactly_ what I've got to atone for, Angel. They could all have been better people, sure, but despite all their flashy powers, they're still only human, not all-knowing, all-wise sages, and anyway, a lot of what they did is a lot less than I _deserve. _I went into this soul redemption thing willingly, and I can't complain now the chickens are coming home to roost and I'm reaping what I've sowed, so don't start going all righteous indignation on Buffy and Co., 'cause as Gunn would put it, they've got plenty of just cause, mate. Besides…" Spike gave a deep shrug, "I was hardly Mr Altruistic in the whole mess. I used the situation to get what I wanted just as much as they each did. Buffy blamed Little Red, but couldn't bring herself to confront her. She hated Willow, and she hated me, but most of all Buffy hated herself for hating us, for hating being back, for not loving Dawn and her friends enough to _not_ resent being resurrected, for wanting to be left where she was…and I used that, make no mistake...I'm sure you know I tried to – hurt – Buffy one time. I've told you before, Angel, Ugly is where I live."

The dark vampire watched as, with this, Spike gave a sniff and walked back into the corridor towards the bar, presumably to either spend the night hours drinking or find somewhere to sleep now the rooms had been overtaken with Vampire Slayers. After the blond vampire disappeared from view, Angel sensed flickers of movement on the balconies and corridors above, the perfect acoustics of the lobby carrying even their quiet conversation further than Spike realised. He sensed guilty shapes drawing back with, hopefully, plenty to think about. _Good_, Angel though harshly, let them stew as they contemplated the less than pleasant reflections of themselves in the mirror of Spike's words…

Continued in Chapter 12

_© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers_


	12. Chapter 12

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 12**

Angel turned as Buffy walked down the stairs, her face pale. He turned back to gaze at the garden, tense, having no doubt she'd heard the exchange and not really caring. He wasn't as forgiving as Spike, incredibly, seemed to be.

"I'm sorry."

"It's hardly _me_ you should be apologising to." Angel retorted pointedly.

"No, I know…" Buffy wrapped her arms round herself, her reflection lonely in the glass doors.

Angel sighed. "Actually, I don't know why I'm so self-righteous. I'm just as guilty as everyone else is at taking Spike at face value. It was easier for me to just blame Spike for everything…like you guys all did."

"Yeah." Buffy didn't smile. "But you're right. He used me a lot less than I used him. I just felt numb inside…I just wanted to feel something, anything…Spike was always there for me, regardless of how bad I treated him." She sighed deeply. "Even…the rape…Rape is never the fault of the victim, but sometimes…when the only thing about you that's consistent is your inconsistency, you can't blame the man for not knowing where he's at…"

"I didn't mean that what he tried to do was excusable –" began Angel uncomfortably.

"No, but it _was_ understandable." Buffy made the confession wearily, echoing Spike's earlier phrase. "You saw what happened…before. After they brought me back, I was such a mess inside _I_ didn't know what I wanted, so why did I expect Spike to telepathically know what I wanted and needed. Buffy the Emotional Yo-Yo, that was me, one second pushing him as far away as I could, the next dragging him to the nearest bed…that night, when he tried…" Buffy shook her head, "…At that point I'd said "'No'" so many times before without really meaning it that it's hardly surprising Spike couldn't tell the difference when I finally _did_ mean what I'd been saying for the past six months."

"Yeah," Angel agreed, but then gave a deep sigh, wryly commenting, "and yet for some reason the Powers That Be are depending on our totally messed up selves to save the world. Somehow that scares me more that the Oligarchs."

"Nothing scares me more than the Oligarchs." Buffy wrapped her arms around herself and hugged in the classic self-protective gesture.

"Buffy? Rutherford Sirk and his little coterie of egomaniacs? You've faced worse – I can list them, alphabetically." Angel frowned at Buffy's drawn face in alarm.

"I'm scared because…I've got too much to lose now." Turning away from her reflection Buffy went back to the centre of the lobby, sinking down on the grey pouffé, incidentally in exactly the same spot that the gang had tied Lorne when his memory-spell went _kaflooey_ and reverted them all to seventeen-year-olds…

The spell that had awoken the dormant Jasmine, who'd stowed away in Cordelia's body for the trip back down from the higher plane…Shaking off the memories, Angel followed her, his expression inquiring.

"I'm legendary, Angel. I'm the Slayer who broke the rules and made a life for myself outside the Slaying…to quote Spike yet again, I'm the Slayer who insisted on having family and friends…but I'm not." Buffy raised sad eyes to Angel. "Nikki Wood was the pathfinder, she was the Slayer who had the courage to break the mould and try to have a life of her own…it was when I got to the garage, expecting to see a little pile of dust and a gloating Robin, when Spike walked out of there and I saw how beat up Robin was, that was when I realised how wrong both Nikki and I were in doing that…"

"Because you were Slayers?"

"Because we were _the Slayer_." Buffy corrected. "What Spike said about only letting people in so far, keeping a little bit of distance no matter how much you love someone…that's what The Slayer had to do to stay sane. I loved you Angel, with all my heart and soul, but in order to save the world, I had to send you to hell, and that's what the Slayer lives with every single day. Even my _mom_ – Dawn the aeons old cosmic energy being loved Joyce Summers more completely than I ever did, or ever _could_, and to this day I _resent_ that. Xander, Willow, Giles…_Dawn_…in the back of my mind there was always the knowledge that one day I _might _have to let them die for the greater good, for the rest of the world to survive…"

For an instant as her voice trailed off, Angel's mind's eye flashed back to what he'd seen on the Ghost Roads, where Wesley castigated Faith for not attacking Angelus even though the vampire would have killed Wesley…_and how many more will he have the chance to murder because you let that make a difference?_

"The Slayer has to view even the people they love most as expendable, because otherwise they can't _be_ what The Slayer needs to be." Angel realised, only aware of uttering the words aloud when Buffy responded.

She nodded emphatically, "That's why you can't give everything of yourself to someone because if you do, and there comes a time when you have to make that decision, you're paralysed, and when that happens, you're not a Champion, just another helpless victim."

"I know." Angel sat down beside her. "We could have saved her – me and Spike. When Illyria was killing Fred, we could have got it back to the Deeper Well, but only by killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. As Drogyn said, once Illyria was out of the sarcophagus it was the mystical equivalent of _airborne_. So I sacrificed Fred for the greater good, just like I was willing to kill Cordelia, despite my…feelings, to save the world from Jasmine. It's what being a Champion is about."

"It's why Nikki Wood was wrong to have her son, and why I was wrong to involve other people." Buffy said. "When you're Slayer, comma, The, you don't have the luxury of being able to indulge yourself like that. Robin should have been the most important thing in his mother's life, but he came secondary to her being the Slayer because she had no choice, there wasn't anyone else to save the world until she died."

"But things are different now…"

"Exactly!" Buffy laughed harshly. "That's what I can't lose, Angel. I know how selfish it is of me, but I can't go back to being comma, definitive article girl – because now I _can_ indulge myself. Now if it comes down to a choice between the people I love and 'X' I _can_ pick _them_ and say: "Screw you!" because there are hundreds of other Slayers able to pick up my torch and carry on the fight. I'm not alone any more."

"That doesn't make you a bad person, Buffy."

"It makes me a bad Slayer, though. When Glory came after Dawn…None of them understood why I trusted _Spike_ to protect my mother and my sister…that fight at the construction site…I sent Spike to save my sister because he was the only one I could trust to save her above any _other_ consideration. Spike loved his Little Bit, and he didn't give a damn about saving the world or any of us, she was all that mattered…"

"…and you couldn't trust Giles not to kill her, if it became necessary, in order to save the world…"

"…Just like he killed Ben, who was an innocent victim, in order to kill Glory." Buffy finished and then went on, "That's Spike's _power_, you see, like perfect clarity is his _gift_. I didn't get it at first…but when he let Glory torture him, brutally, and he wouldn't give up Dawn…Spike doesn't give a damn about causes, he doesn't give a damn about some ideal…Spike gives his loyalty to _people_, not things. He would have died to save Dawn and let the universe be damned. That's why he's still here, Angel, not for the Shanshu. He'll grumble and groan and irritate and argue until he's as blue in the face as Illyria, but he's _not_ motivated by the Shanshu Prophecy. He stayed because Fred Burkle risked her life to try and restore him to corporeal form and when he couldn't save her life in return he dedicated himself to doing what she would have wanted him to do…"

Buffy's voice cracked, and she concentrated on regaining her composure, unaware of the way Angel flinched, remembering the exchange he'd witnessed between Illyria and Spike in the training room at the time Illyria's power began to pulse erratically, sending the demon bouncing around Time:

"_You had fondness for the shell, for Fred."_

"_Tons. Loved the bird…_"

So short, so simple, so raw in honesty, so Spike…

Buffy finished softly, "He's here for _you, _Angel, because he does care about you, and he will pass up the chance to be a real boy again to give you the opportunity."

"I know." Angel confessed softly. "Though of course you can douse me in holy water and I'll still not admit it."

Buffy gave a hiccupping chuckle, her eyes sheened with tears. "It was horrible, Angel. Being _The Slayer_, the world's only line of defence against the nightmares. It was bleak and empty and lonely and painful. It was despair and hurting, all the time. But now I'm _a Slayer._ I'm only part of the defence; I can have a _life_ instead of just an _existence_. All Slayers can. Faith's about to become the second Slayer in history to bear a child, but it's different now. It doesn't matter that she'll be part-time for a few years until her and Robin's daughter grows up a bit, because there are hundreds of Slayers to take her place. Thanks to Willow, a Slayer can have children and get married and take a real job…we can get rid of that last barrier between ourselves and the people we love…"

"I get that." Angel told her. "Wesley…Fred…Gunn…Cordelia…they age, whereas I don't. Wesley's thirty-seven this year…he's already starting a bit with the arthritis. Gunn's too vain to admit that he sometimes needs spectacles for the small print stuff. I wanted to go down to the beach at midday for a game of Frisbee like Wes and Gunn used to do, I wanted to try retail therapy with Fred and Cordy and finish off with lattes on the Drive. Most of all, I want to be able to care about them unconditionally instead of having to hold back and protect a little bit of my heart ready for the possibility of _them_ dying of old age while _I'm_ perpetually stuck in Season Three of Friends."

"You watched Friends?" Buffy raised both eyebrows.

"Jennifer Aniston." Angel shrugged. "What can I say?"

"I can't top that." Buffy stood up slowly, briefly laying her hand on Angel's arm and giving it a gentle squeeze before slowly making her way over to the stairs.

As she walked up she paused and looked back down at him, "I'm sorry I came down on you when you decided to join Wolfram & Hart. I didn't agree with it and I still don't, and I wouldn't have done it but I _understand_ why you did it. You've helped many more people since you've been here than you ever could before. You learned the lesson that being a Champion doesn't make you infallible a lot quicker than Buffy Anne "President of the Pigheaded League" Summers did."

Angel smiled. "Not quite as catchy as Slayer, comma, The." He pointed out as he watched her walk up and away, finally leaving him alone with his thoughts.

Concluded in Chapter 13

_© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers_


	13. Chapter 13

_**Disclaimer**__: See Part 1 Chapter 1_

**SHADOWED SOULS Part 4**

**Chapter 13**

As he walked towards the stairs to the fifth floor away from the balcony overlooking the lobby, Wesley kept his face bland as he met Giles, Robin and surprisingly Andrew Wells. Wesley suppressed the urge to raise an eyebrow pointedly as he took in Robin and Giles' identical sulkily defensive expressions, their crimped lips, flushed cheeks and narrowed eyes forming the classic dyspeptic petulance of someone who has heard hard truths they would rather not acknowledge.

Andrew looked particularly 'trembling fawn' like and Wesley allowed himself a slight smirk at the youth. When Andrew had come to LA to find Dana Parvati, he had treated Wesley as though the Englishman had washed out, unable to cut it as a Watcher. Now the little twerp had had his eyes opened to the feet of clay possessed by Mr Rupert Giles, and glimpsed an inkling of the terrible price Wesley Wyndham-Pryce had paid for his choice to be a good guy. Let's hope there would be plenty of sleepless self-examination taking place at the Hyperion tonight.

Without a word, Wesley went up the stairs, the thick pile of the carpet muffling his footsteps. He and Fred, or rather Illyria, had commandeered one of the hotel's top-floor Penthouse Suites, and since nobody was inclined to argue with, as Xander termed it, "the psycho-Smurf", they suffered no crowding. Wesley paused as he felt the change in air pressure, a subtle warning of a presence that wasn't Fred. A tall slender woman with a bad red dye job slid out of the shadows, smiling at him.

"Justine." Wesley acknowledged. "What a non-surprise."

"Oh come on." Justine shrugged. "It wasn't that risky. Who's going to notice one more poppy in a field of them," she waved a hand to indicate the surrounding rooms packed with Slayers. "I've been watching the show from the rotunda all night – and you've got a problem."

"Who?"

"Watchers, comma, The." Justine replied, effectively answering any question as to how much she'd heard of what had transpired this evening – of course the rotunda roof _would_ be the best place for anyone to listen in, since from that vantage point the lobby's perfect acoustics would come off better than Digital Surround Sound.

"The Watchers were here…the _old _Watchers?"

"Yep. They're not happy with you…or Rupert Giles for that matter. Very cutting," Justine smirked, "but the important thing is that they were sat outside the hotel in those FBI-type transit vans pointing parabolic mikes at this place, starting from about fifteen minutes before you and Angel took your little post-prandial stroll into the ether."

"So they know…"

"Everything you said. The Dark Slayer's up the duff, Buffy Summers should be had up for spousal abuse. Angel the fluffy watches _Friends_." Justine rolled her eyes at his wooden face. "Seriously though, you really lit a fire under them when you said 'Rutherford Sirk'. They really don't like him, more than they don't like you and your vampire buddy."

"Rutherford Sirk has been the Watchers Public Enemy Number One for years." Wesley commented.

"Yeah, well, get ready for them to gatecrash your little council of war session in the belly of the beast tomorrow. From what I could hear, they think that Sirk's going to have to show up in person to whack the Slayers and they intend to take him out themselves. They certainly have no intention of letting a pair disgraces to the Watchers like you and Giles do it, because you'd probably make a…'complete cock-up of it' anyway?"

"I see." Wesley considered. "Sirk probably will have regrouped by tomorrow and he may well go for the big showdown by teleporting in with his group. His ego will demand he publicly swats us like flies, and he's certainly spent enough time at Wolfram & Hart to know all the secret ways in." _Plus whatever little booby-traps he, Eve and Lindsay set up while Angel and Spike were safely out of the way chasing that ridiculous Cup of Perpetual Torment,_ Wesley mused. "At the risk of repeating myself, it may be imprudent for you to be lurking around tomorrow."

"Yeah, that's why I wouldn't miss it for the world." With a grin, Justine gave him a mocking salute and walked away, presumably back to whatever rooftop skylight she came in by.

Wesley didn't follow to secure her exit – any burglar or rapist type who broke in tonight would definitely deeply regret (assumed he survived at all) invading a hotel containing scores of Slayers, the world's most powerful witch, two vampires, the Scooby Gang, Team Angel and a ten-million year old warrior demon –

Who was standing right there, watching the departing Justine Cooper.

To be continued in Shadowed Souls Part 5

_© 2006 & 2010, The Cat's Whiskers_


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